OpenAI plans to acquire Astral, a startup recognized for its first Python developer tools to improve its AI coding features in the Codex ecosystem, announced on March 19, 2026. This move intends to boost OpenAI’s software development tools as it competes with companies like Anthropic.
Main Details of the Acquisition
- Astral’s team, led by founder Charlie Marsh, will join OpenAI to help improve the Codex AI coding assistant. Their goal is to turn Codex from just a code generator into a full development workflow tool.
- Astral is well known for its tools built in Ruff. uv provides fast, reliable Python dependency management, helping developers set up and maintain environments quickly. ruff provides rapid and efficient code linting and formatting to maintain code quality. Dry accelerates type unchecking, ensuring type issues are detected early without slowing down the workflow.
- The deal is meant to strengthen OpenAI’s Python tools by leveraging Astral’s expertise to improve linting and type-checking, enabling more efficient code management. Python is an important language for AI development.
Context of the Deal
- OpenAI says its Codex AI coding assistant now has over 2 million active users. Since the start of the year, user numbers have tripled, and overall usage has grown fivefold.
- This acquisition forms part of OpenAI’s effort to keep up with competitors in the AI coding assistant market, especially as rivals like Anthropic’s Claude continue to grow.
- The deal brings both new talent by hiring expert Rust engineers and new products by adding Astral’s fast tools to improve AI agent productivity.
- The acquisition still needs to meet standard closing conditions and get regulatory approval before it’s finalized.
This acquisition follows a series of recent purchases by OpenAI as it looks to build a complete developer ecosystem.
Today, we are excited to announce that OpenAI is acquiring Astral, bringing powerful open-source developer tools into our Codex ecosystem.
Astral has created widely used open-source Python tools, including UV, Ruff, and TY, that support millions of developers and are essential to Python development. After the acquisition, OpenAI will continue to maintain Astral’s open-source products as part of our ongoing pledge to developers. By combining Astral’s tools and expertise with OpenAI, we’ll accelerate progress on codecs and expand AI’s role in software development.
Expanding Codex Beyond Coding
Since the start of the year, Codex has tripled its user base and seen usage grow fivefold, now reaching over 2 million weekly active users.
With Codex, our goal is to go beyond AI that just writes code. We want to build systems that support the entire development process from planning changes and updating code bases to running tools, checking results, and maintaining software over time as trials and developer tools are already part of this process. Following regulatory approval and close of the acquisition, we plan to begin integrating Astral’s tools with Codex so AI agents can work more closely with the tools developers use every day.
Astral has always focused on building tools that change how developers work with Python, helping them ship better software faster. As part of Codex, we’ll continue evaluating our open-source tools to push the boundaries of software development. I am Charlie Marsh, Founder and CEO of Astral.
Strengthening the Python Ecosystem
Python has become one of the most important languages in contemporary software development, powering everything from AI and data science to backend systems and developer infrastructure.
Astral’s open-source tools already play a key role in that ecosystem.
- uv simplifies and speeds up dependency and environment management for Python developers, making project setup and updates more efficient.
- Ruff provides extremely fast linting and formatting, quickly identifying code issues and enforcing consistent style to maintain code quality.
- ty helps enforce type safety across codebases, automatically spotting type errors to improve code correctness.
Together, these tools and developers manage projects, ensure quality, and catch mistakes early in the development process. With Astral joining, OpenAI will continue supporting these open-source projects and explore ways to make them work even better with Codex. This will help let AI systems operate across the entire Python development workflow. Our goal is simple: help developers move faster while keeping the dependency and speed they need.
Ashton’s tools are used by millions of Python developers by providing their expertise and ecosystem to OpenAI. We are accelerating our vision for Codex as the region best positioned to work across the entire developer lifecycle. Thibault Sottiaux, Codex lead at OpenAI.
What’s Next
The Acquisitions Closing is subject to, and complements, all customary closing conditions, including receipt of regulatory approval. Until the closing, OpenAI and Astra will remain separate and independent companies.
After the acquisition is complete, the Astral team will join the Codex team at OpenAI. Following the close we will begin working to connect Codex more closely with the tools developers already use, making Codex a real partner throughout the development process. Our goal is still to build AI systems, help people create, learn, and build faster, and make powerful development tools available to new people. We are excited to welcome the Astral team to OpenAI once the deal is closed.
Source: OpenAI to acquire Astral
