Canonical is co-funding a three-year PhD project at the University of Bristol to investigate whether AI can translate large C codebases into safe, idiomatic Rust. Announced by engineering vice-president Jon Seager on Ubuntu's Discourse forum, the project is a research effort rather than a plan to rewrite Ubuntu wholesale, and aims to produce evidence on whether AI-assisted translation can genuinely work, in contrast to existing source-to-source tools that tend to preserve C's structure too literally and leave code reliant on unsafe operations.

The research will explore whether an LLM can break programs of "hundreds of thousands of lines of C" into smaller components before rewriting them into "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust," with snap-confine and AppArmor named as candidate test cases. Canonical is co-sponsoring the work with UK Research and Innovation, and Seager will oversee it alongside Bristol's Professor Meng Wang and Dr Cristina David. This differs from Canonical's earlier Rust moves, such as adopting the pre-existing sudo-rs and uutils projects in Ubuntu 25.10, since those were human-written rewrites rather than AI-generated translations.