// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
AI Can No Longer Rampage Through Rust's Code Repo
The Rust project has implemented a formal LLM policy, which pushes people to use LLMs to analyze/think through code, not write it.
With how it is written right now, the policy only covers the core code repo for Rust. It lays out many rules around what's restricted, what's allowed, and a circuit breaker that pauses AI-authored merges once they cross half of all merges in a six-week window.
Just so you know, the core repo hosts the compiler and standard library for the entire language. Every Rust program depends on code that lives here, which makes it a very important repo to moderate.
It's no surprise they banned LLM use the way they did.
An LLM can't write your comments, issues, or PR descriptions under your name. Documentation, safety comments, and compiler diagnostics are all off-limits too. And an LLM review can never substitute for a human one or for reviewing your own code before you post it.
What's allowed is private use. Asking an LLM questions about the codebase needs no disclosure, and neither does privately reviewing your own code, summarizing a PR for yourself, or building personal dev tools with one.
Apart from that, there are a few things that reside in a gray area. Machine translation, trivial fixes made with an LLM, and self-verified bug hunting all sit here, and each one needs to be disclosed.
AI-written code gets the strictest treatment of all. It has to be pre-arranged with a reviewer, unlikely to introduce a bug that breaks Rust's safety guarantees, fully tested, and understood on both sides before it earns the new ai-assisted label.
Jynn Nelson, who wrote up the original policy that the project has now adopted, concluded the announcement by stating that:
NetworkManager, the default network daemon on most mainstream Linux distributions, has picked up an AI coding assistants policy of its own, recently merging a new section to its CONTRIBUTING.md file.