LibreOffice has made “no AI” a selling point. It turns out the story is more nuanced.
What happened
A Fediverse user pointed out three LibreOffice commits this year that credit LLM help. Two in April credit Claude with helping find the fixes. One in September says GitHub Copilot in VS Code generated a class for a new Copy Image button. The Document Foundation replied that no core developers use LLMs. It relies on community contributors, doesn’t ban specific tools, and requires people to disclose LLM use. TDF also says LibreOffice has no built-in AI features, and it just reported 9.4 million downloads in eight weeks.
My take
“No AI features in the app” and “no AI-assisted code in the repo” are different promises. TDF is keeping the first one, and the disclosure rule is honestly the right way to handle the second. Transparency beats pretending.
God Bless, and Use the Source!
