Free AI Extension for TYPO3: AI Foundation Is Open Source, With No Licence Key

Every TYPO3 site you look after can run AI Foundation, production included, and nobody has to buy a licence or sign up first. The licence is GPL-2.0-or-later open source, and you will find this free AI extension for TYPO3 in the TYPO3 Extension Repository (TER), on GitHub and on Packagist. One Composer command installs it. Installing it asks for no licence key, no account and no list of domains.

So what does free mean for you once it sits on a client project? This post covers five things: the install, the modules, where your content travels, what the licence allows, and building on top.

The short answer: AI Foundation, from T3Planet, is a free, open source TYPO3 extension that gives your AI setup a single home. You configure providers, prompts, brand context and permissions once, in one backend module. On top of that sits an MCP server, which lets Claude, Cursor and similar assistants work inside TYPO3 directly. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, is how those assistants connect to other software.

Nothing in the product sits behind a payment:

• There is no price, however many sites you run it on.
• You never enter a licence key, and installing it needs no account, because there is nothing to activate.
• No domain limit and no time limit, and production counts like any other environment.
• It makes no licence call. Running on your own API keys, it sends T3Planet nothing.
• Its licence is GPL-2.0-or-later, the one TYPO3 itself uses.

For you as an agency, per-client licence administration comes off the table. AI Foundation can go into every project you build as a matter of course.

Before you start, check three things: TYPO3 12.4 LTS, 13.4 LTS or 14.x, PHP 8.2 or newer, and the scheduler and workspaces system extensions switched on. Both system extensions ship with TYPO3. If Composer is new to your team, we wrote a guide to installing TYPO3 extensions with Composer for you.

Step 1: Require the package

• Run composer require nitsan/ns-t3af from your project root.
• Composer fetches the current stable release from Packagist.
• Nothing else is needed. No key, no account, no activation step.

If your installation does not use Composer, TER works too, though Composer remains the recommended route.

Step 2: Set up the extension

• Create the database tables with vendor/bin/typo3 extension:setup.
• Clear the caches with vendor/bin/typo3 cache:flush.
• Reload the backend: the AI Foundation module group now shows in the sidebar.

That completes the setup, and nothing is waiting to be unlocked.

Step 3: Connect your first AI provider

• Start the Quick Setup wizard in the module header. Its steps cover the provider, your API key, brand context and the MCP server, and you can skip any of them.
• Pick from providers including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, Mistral, Azure OpenAI and OpenRouter, always with your own key.
• To keep everything on your own infrastructure, choose a local Ollama model instead.

Your team now sets AI up in one central place, and every AI feature built on AI Foundation uses that setup.

MCP server and MCP tools

Assistants connect to the MCP server over Remote (OAuth), WebSocket, Docker, an SSH tunnel or npx, whichever suits your setup. MCP Tools lists the built-in TYPO3 Core tools, and you can add tools of your own there.

AI Context and AI Prompts

Brand profiles live in AI Context and are added to every prompt automatically. AI Prompts holds the templates, and each AI extension you install adds its own categories; the screenshot shows those of our premium extensions.

AI Permissions and Scheduler & CLI

Your backend groups get their AI rights in a permission matrix, one tab per extension. Scheduler & CLI gathers the t3af:* commands of every installed extension and schedules them in the TYPO3 Scheduler.

AI Label

What a person has confirmed, what is still waiting for review and what visitors see in the frontend: AI Label shows all three at once.

That is compliance-ready tooling, not a compliance guarantee. Reviewing and disclosing stays in your hands. The product page on open source AI for TYPO3 goes through each module in detail.

Start with the most private setup: point AI Foundation at a local Ollama model, and its requests go to no external AI service. With a cloud provider, your own API keys are the default, and AI Foundation calls that provider straight from your server. With your own keys, no T3Planet server sits between your TYPO3 installation and the provider, and the extension makes no call home.

Which model sees your content is your decision to make, and we built the controls for it into AI Foundation for you: per provider, per extension and per backend group. Keep assistants connected through the MCP server in mind too: Claude, Cursor and others pass what they read on to the model they run on.

Which model sees your content is your decision to make.

If your team would rather not manage API keys, the optional AI Credits add-on covers that. It is the one setup in which requests travel through T3Planet to the model providers. You never need it, and your own keys remain the default.

As a GPL-2.0-or-later TYPO3 extension, AI Foundation shares its licence with TYPO3 itself. In TYPO3's own words:

TYPO3 CMS 3.x and higher is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

TYPO3, TYPO3's Open Source Licenses, accessed 11 September 2026

Put into agency practice, that licence gives you four freedoms:

1. Audit before you install. Your developers can read the complete source on GitHub and check what the extension does before it goes near a client system.
2. Adapt it per project. Changing the code for your own installations is allowed.
3. Fork when you need to. Maintaining your own copy is within your rights under the GPL, so no project hinges on one vendor's roadmap.
4. Pass changes on under the same terms. Distribute a modified version and it remains under the GNU General Public License, version 2 or later.

You do not have to take our word for any of this. GitHub Actions runs automated tests against TYPO3 13 and 14, and the badges in the README show the latest result. If you find a vulnerability, report it privately to security@t3planet.de: SECURITY.md sets a target of acknowledging it within three business days. The decision you make together with your clients then rests on code anyone can read, not on a promise.

If you write TYPO3 extensions yourself, AI Foundation saves you the plumbing. Providers, usage logging and permissions are handled for you, and your code talks to a single interface. The contract has three parts:

1. Declare the dependency. nitsan/ns-t3af goes into your extension's composer.json.
2. Inject the service. Dependency injection hands your class an AiServiceInterface.
3. Call complete(). Send the prompt along with an extensionKey and a featureKey, and AI Foundation chooses the provider, runs the request and records the usage.

In return, your extension inherits every provider your team has configured, the brand context, the permission model and the central log. You do not ship a provider SDK. Features can also become tools for any connected MCP client: register a public tool service tagged mcp.tool and put #[McpTool] on its execute() method, as the Developer Guide describes step by step.

The AI Foundation Developer Guide documents every contract. As a worked example, the ns_t3af_extended reference extension demonstrates each documented integration hook. And if an AI coding assistant writes part of your code, our Claude Code and TYPO3 developer guide is a useful companion.

This is the same contract our own AI extensions for TYPO3 are built on. AI Assistant, AI Chatbot, AI Search and AI Accessibility are premium extensions that add their features on top, and AI Foundation runs in full without any of them.

Pull requests are welcome in the AI Foundation repository on GitHub, and so are bug reports, fixes, tests and documentation. CONTRIBUTING.md tells you up front which checks a pull request has to pass: coding standards, static analysis and tests. Clear those and your change arrives ready for review, so we can improve the foundation together.

As a TYPO3 Association Gold Member with more than 15 years of TYPO3 work, over 3,200 customers and more than 100 published open-source extensions, the T3Planet team at NITSAN Technologies maintains AI Foundation.

Ready to try it? Explore AI Foundation, or book a call with Jürgen, our AI Consultant for TYPO3 and work out together how AI Foundation fits your projects.