OpenAI to acquire Astral

Today we’re announcing that OpenAI will acquire Astral⁠(opens in a new window), bringing powerful open source developer tools into our Codex ecosystem.

Astral has built some of the most widely used open source Python tools, helping developers move faster with modern tooling like uv, Ruff, and ty. These tools power millions of developer workflows and have become part of the foundation of modern Python development. As part of our developer-first philosophy, after closing OpenAI plans to support Astral’s open source products. By bringing Astral’s tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, we will accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle.

Expanding Codex beyond coding

Codex has already seen 3x user growth and 5x usage increase since the start of the year, and has over 2 million weekly active users.

Our goal with Codex is to move beyond AI that simply generates code and toward systems that can participate in the entire development workflow—helping plan changes, modify codebases, run tools, verify results, and maintain software over time. Astral’s developer tools sit directly in that workflow. By integrating these systems with Codex after closing, we will enable AI agents to work more directly with the tools developers already rely on every day.

“Astral has always focused on building tools that transform how developers work with Python—helping them ship better software, faster. As part of Codex, we’ll continue evolving our open source tools to push the frontier of software development.”

— Charlie Marsh, Founder & CEO of Astral

Strengthening the Python ecosystem

Python has become one of the most important languages in modern 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:

— Thibault Sottiaux, Codex Lead at OpenAI