OpenAI is a Rust Foundation platinum level donor. They gave straight cash which can go toward paying maintainers, which is better IMO. This actually made a lot of people angry because they saw it as a risk of OpenAI gaining influence or something. Can't make everyone happy.

OpenAI also hands out free subscriptions to open source maintainers: https://developers.openai.com/community/codex-for-oss They're time limited for now, but they've been pretty generous about who gets them. Anyone who can show Rust contributions would have been able to get one before.

LLM written code is disallowed by the rust project policy

https://forge.rust-lang.org/policies/llm-usage.html

Both OpenAI and Anthropic have robust programs for free tokens that you can apply to if you are a significant enough oss maintainer.

What you suggest may thus be more or less already happening.

This is one of the most important objectives in software today.

Rust is the best language to serialize agentic LLM output to. It's native, well constructed, low-defect due to design. It's also easy for humans to read and debug if necessary.

The biggest problem with Rust is the compile times. The cycle has to get faster. And we need to start thinking about making the artifact cache non-blocking so multiple agents can work simultaneously - that'll be a big task, but essential if we want to speed up work on one machine rather than spinning up clusters of agent sandboxes (the alternative, perhaps superior solution).

If you have fast enough hardware then Rust compile times are already not that big of a deal.