You are free to use AI to write Zig code just not use AI to write code for Zig. In fact, many people already do build software with zig written by AI. Check out rockorager's github.
Schools like MIT pay PhD students barely above or sometimes below the poverty level of that particular state as monthly stipend. Yeah, research funding got slashed but if they had the will they could have come up with the money for that 20%.
OpenAI is very good in terms of not having as much outages as Anthropic, but almost all products except Codex and the pro model is unimpressive, anthropic has the opposite situation.
There's no way I am using such an important piece of life as an IDE from Google just because I know they are going to kill it within 3 years, if it survives that much. Probably will die with the Windsurf guy jumping ship again.