OpenAI formally announced on Thursday that it has agreed to acquire Ona, a cloud execution and orchestration startup, as part of a push to fortify the infrastructure behind its growing AI coding assistant, Codex.
Ona's platform specializes in creating secure, long‑running cloud environments where autonomous AI agents can operate independently. According to OpenAI, this capability "will expand Codex beyond work tied to a single device or active session and help more organizations deploy agents securely in production."
"Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace," said Ona CEO Johannes Landgraf in remarks shared in acquisition announcements. OpenAI first introduced Codex in its modern, cloud‑native form in 2025, pitching it as "a cloud-based software engineering agent that can work on many tasks in parallel."
Since then, Codex has seen explosive growth, now serving more than 5 million weekly users, a roughly 400% increase over earlier stages of adoption, according to OpenAI data.
While Codex can already generate code and handle moment‑to‑moment programming tasks, integrating Ona's secure cloud infrastructure is viewed as a move to make Codex viable for regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, and government, where data residency and compliance policies are non‑negotiable.
Thibault Sottiaux, Core Products Lead at OpenAI, said: "Enterprises want powerful agents that can do real work while meeting the security and control requirements of their environments. Ona will help us make Codex easier to deploy securely across production workflows for customers operating at the highest standards of trust and scale."
Ona's environment lets agents run within customer‑controlled cloud services like AWS or Google Cloud Platform, addressing a key adoption hurdle for businesses that have been wary of sending sensitive code and logic outside their own infrastructure.
Industry analysts see the Ona purchase as part of OpenAI's response to competitive pressure from companies like Anthropic, whose own AI coding tools have been gaining attention. To entice enterprise customers, OpenAI has offered free Codex enterprise usage credits and one‑click migration tools, underscoring the centrality of coding assistants in the modern AI product landscape.
Financial terms of the deal were not made public, and OpenAI wrote, "The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals." Until the acquisition is finalized, Ona and OpenAI are expected to "remain separate and independent companies."
Earlier this year, OpenAI acquired other specialist teams and tools, including open‑source Python dev tool, Astral, and agent infrastructure, to reinforce Codex and broaden its appeal to professionals across industries.
