MS Word alternative LibreOffice releases an updated version deliberately free of AI
Going against the trend.
Image by the Document Foundation/Cybernews
- LibreOffice 26.8 launched on August 26, 2026, as a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office.
- The update improves multilingual writing, typography, and document exchange with Microsoft Office chart formats.
- The Document Foundation excluded generative AI to keep documents local and reduce privacy risks.
- LibreOffice supports Europe’s push for digital sovereignty through open formats and lower reliance on US software providers.
Key Takeaways by nexos.ai, reviewed by Cybernews staff.
LibreOffice 26.8 promises improved writing systems and smoother document exchange with other suites, while its lack of generative AI could ensure greater privacy.
The Document Foundation, the Berlin-based nonprofit organization that manages the development of the LibreOffice productivity suite, announced a major release on August 26th, 2026.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source productivity suite that serves as an alternative to proprietary software such as Microsoft Office, Apple’s iWork suite, and Google Workspace.
The development of the new version involved 206 contributors, 155 of whom were volunteers, according to the press release.
LibreOffice 26.8 is available immediately and can be downloaded for Windows, macOS, and Linux, in 120 languages.
Meanwhile, the LibreOffice 26.2 branch will reach end of life on November 30th, 2026.
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Improved writing systems and typography
One of the major updates in LibreOffice 26.8 improves access to writing systems in various languages in both Writer, a word processor, and Calc, a spreadsheet program.
Writer now detects paragraph direction automatically, wraps bidirectional lines correctly, and handles object resizing in right-to-left and vertical Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) documents.
In addition, Calc automatically sets the cell direction when right-to-left text is entered.
Moreover, Writer introduces the Paragraph Composer, a text layout algorithm that balances word spacing across consecutive lines instead of optimizing each line in isolation.
OpenType font variations are now natively supported in LibreOffice 26.8, allowing variable fonts to be used as intended.
Smoother document exchange
Chart, an in-built LibreOffice tool for chart creation, now provides basic round-trip support for the newer chart types that Microsoft Office writes into OOXML files, including box-and-whisker, funnel, Pareto, sunburst, treemap, and waterfall.
These charts cannot yet be rendered or edited.
However, LibreOffice displays a message identifying the unsupported type and preserves the underlying definition, so that a file opened and saved in LibreOffice returns to its originating application intact.
AI-free version
The latest LibreOffice version doesn’t integrate AI features.
As a result, documents are not “transmitted to remote services for processing, and no component of the suite requires network access to function,” according to the Document Foundation.
This is a deliberate position. Any organization handling confidential, legally privileged, or personal data needs to know where that data goes, and the only assurance that survives an audit is that it does not leave the machine,The Document Foundation
The decision comes as LibreOffice’s alternatives, such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs, are increasingly integrating AI tools as defaults in their software, raising privacy concerns about data being collected and used for AI training.
Meanwhile, LibreOffice 26.8 includes no advertising, no telemetry, no subscription, and no account requirement, with only a donation banner displayed in the Start Center.
Empowering European tech sovereignty
LibreOffice 26.8 has been released as European countries are actively exploring alternatives to American technologies.
Open-source software plays an important role in Europe’s digital sovereignty push.
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein moved 80% of its public administration workplaces from Microsoft 365 to LibreOffice in 2025. The state said it hopes the transition will help save over €15 million ($17.5 million) in license costs per year.
Germany’s Federal Ministry for Digital Transformation and Government Modernization announced in 2026 that the country’s public sector documents will be issued only in open formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF), supported by LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation says that adopting a European cloud provider or hosting everything within an organization’s jurisdiction cannot ensure sovereignty if its documents remain in a format only one foreign supplier can read correctly.
It says, “An organization that cannot open its own archives without a supplier’s permission is not sovereign over them, wherever those archives happen to be stored.”
Despite growing interest in European tech sovereignty, 74% of the continent’s publicly listed companies rely on US‑based providers like Google and Microsoft for critical services, according to an analysis by Proton.