LibreOffice's 'no AI' stance meets LLM-assisted code

The Document Foundation (TDF) says LibreOffice has no built-in AI features and that its core developers do not use LLMs - but community contributors face different rules.

In a Fediverse post, someone who goes by the handle of argv[-1] highlights three LibreOffice commits this year that acknowledge the use of LLM coding assistants.

Two of them – Inheritance when setting paragraph style font size to 100% or +0pt and Enable relative font sizes in Calc cell styles – date from April and credit Claude with helping identify the fixes. More recently, September's Add Copy Image button to screenshot dialog acknowledges using GitHub Copilot in VS Code to generate the BitmapTransferable class, while the copyButtonHandler method was written manually with LLM/code-completion assistance.

This is hardly a fatal flaw – after all, it's getting hard to find any major FOSS project with absolutely no LLM-generated code in it these days.

However, The Document Foundation says that the leading FOSS office suite is AI-free. As we noted when it released version 26.8 in August, we interpret this statement as a jab at its former development partner Collabora. Back in June, we noted that increased AI integration was a headline feature in Collabora CODE 26.04. CODE is Collabora's web-based office suite, based on LibreOffice code.

TDF – the primary maintainer and custodian of LibreOffice since its 2010 fork from Oracle-controlled OpenOffice.org – has made the absence of built-in AI a selling point. In September, it published a blog post declaring that no AI is now a feature. Meanwhile, on October 21, TDF announced 9.4 million downloads over eight weeks – excluding Windows updates and downloads of older releases, which are counted separately. The foundation acknowledged that the reasons for the growth are difficult to determine.

TDF's direct response on Mastodon is dismissive:

"Ah, another high-quality Mastodon discussion. Again: No core developers use LLMs. We rely on contributions from the wider community and don't explicitly list tools people can't use – but we do require people disclose when they use LLMs and generally discourage the practice. We carefully review submissions by contributors to make sure the code quality is good and that the patch author understands their own code. LLMs are prohibited for students. That is not 'slop'."

In other words, TDF's approach resembles what some commenters have compared to the Debian approach: LLM coding assistants are permitted for some contributors, subject to disclosure and human review. For AI advocates, this is the only pragmatic response – which could be summarized as the "AI is just a tool" school of thought.

However, since this admission does seem to contradict the very visible public no-AI message, some LibreOffice users are really rather unhappy. Our favorite comment so far is from Argentinian developer Federico Schonborn, who slyly noted:

"When a bakery announces they won't put asbestos in their cake frosting you must not point out they're already putting asbestos in their cake filling, you see."

We asked TDF’s spokesman Italo Vignoli for comment. He pointed us to TDF's Development/AI policy, and added:

"There isn't any departure from the public statements about LO 26.8, as they were about user features and not about development."

As "Skjeggtroll" succinctly put it:

"It strikes me as odd to ban all use of LLM for the commit message, but still allow its use for the actual code." ®