OpenAI just officially joined the Rust Foundation as a platinum member, and it's putting its money where its mouth is: the company has committed a total of $600,000 through the foundation. The funds, combined with platinum membership dues, will support the Rust Project Goals, the Rust Innovation Lab, and directly sponsor maintainers of widely depended-upon open source projects in the Rust ecosystem.
https://twitter.com/charliermarsh/status/2067280638994968657
As part of the deal, Predrag Gruevski — an OpenAI staffer, longtime Rust community member, and maintainer of the version compatibility checker cargo-semver-checks — will represent OpenAI on the Rust Foundation board. Gruevski says Rust helps teams build low-level systems quickly without having to compromise on performance, safety, or reliability. OpenAI plans to work with the Rust Project's Funding Team to figure out the most effective way to distribute the cash.
Two days before announcing its foundation membership, OpenAI had already kicked off over $160,000 in direct sponsorships via GitHub Sponsors, targeting maintainers of projects that the Astral and Codex toolchains depend on. The sponsorships cover all projects previously supported by the Astral OSS fund, and expanded in scale when they moved over to OpenAI's sponsorship account. OpenAI has long seen Rust as the future of systems programming and says more support is on the way.