OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walks through the Hart Senate Building after a meeting at the Capitol on June 3, 2026 in Washington, DC, USA.
Evelyn HochsteinReuter
OpenAI announced Thursday that it is acquiring Ona, a startup that provides a secure, preconfigured cloud environment where artificial intelligence agents can access tools, systems, and context.
OpenAI says Ona’s technology will enable Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant, to take on long-running tasks. The company also said this could encourage more organizations to deploy agents into production environments that independently complete tasks on behalf of users.
OpenAI did not disclose terms of the acquisition, but the acquisition remains subject to customary closing conditions. Ona’s staff will join OpenAI once the deal closes and work on the Codex team.
“We always thought selling a company would feel like the end. Instead, it feels like our life’s work has become bigger and more important,” Ona CEO Johannes Landgraf said in a LinkedIn post.
OpenAI sparked the AI boom in 2022 with the introduction of ChatGPT chatbot. As software developers embrace AI agents as part of their workflows, they’ve poured investment into Codex in recent months. It competes with its biggest rival, Anthropic. Anthropic has experienced explosive growth in the last year, thanks in part to the popularity of its AI coding assistant, Claude Code.
Codex supports more than 5 million weekly active users, up from 3 million in April. Anthropic has not disclosed the number of users of Claude Code.
OpenAI confidentially filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, just days after Anthropic filed its own confidential filing with regulators.
Elon Musk’s space xwhich merged with his AI startup xAI earlier this year, is set to begin trading on Friday in what is expected to be the largest public market debut in history.
To maintain an edge over its competitors, OpenAI has made a number of acquisitions in recent months. The company acquired healthcare technology startup Torch in January for about $60 million, and in March announced it would acquire cybersecurity startup Promptfu.
The deal follows OpenAI’s announcement in October that it had acquired startup Software Applications to develop an AI interface called Sky. apple Mac users. OpenAI shocked the tech industry in May 2025 when it announced that it had acquired Jony Ive’s AI device startup io for more than $6 billion.
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