Rust adopts a policy: LLMs may review, not create

Five teams inside the Rust project have adopted an LLM usage policy for the rust-lang/rust monorepo, written by Nelson. The policy summarizes itself in one line: "It's fine to use LLMs to answer questions, analyze, distill, refine, check, suggest, review. But not to create." Disclosure is mandatory for public LLM-assisted content, LLM-generated code changes are held to a higher bar than human-authored ones (tests required, soundness-critical changes strongly discouraged even for domain experts), and reviewers may close non-compliant PRs without further discussion. Nelson names the pressure that forced the issue: at the time of writing there are 1,281 open PRs against the repository, and "with LLMs, none of these signals are reliable" that a polished, well-tested PR represents someone who understands their own code and intends to stick around.

Why it matters: Rust is the fourth institutional AI-contribution policy Dark Factory has tracked, after Codeberg, Debian and GCC, and the first to publish its reasoning at length instead of just the rule. If your factory contributes upstream to projects that have not yet drawn this line, expect them to draw it soon, and expect the Rust framing, LLMs may critique but not originate, to be the template they borrow.