OpenAI is buying Ona, previously often called Gitpod, a startup that lets AI brokers run in cloud-based sandboxes slightly than on native developer machines. The deal strengthens Codex, OpenAI’s software program growth assistant, giving it the power to deal with duties that take hours or days with out interruption from a workstation shutdown. This type of workflow is at present dominated by Anthropic inside enterprises, which means OpenAI feels the necessity to strike again by hiring high expertise and tech.
Working multi-day AI coding duties is one thing ill-suited to native {hardware}. Ona solves this by shifting agent workloads into persistent cloud sandboxes. These sandboxes keep on-line even after the developer’s machine shuts down, permitting multi-day duties to proceed uninterrupted.
The corporate additionally pitches cloud compute as a pace benefit. Ona’s sandboxes draw on cloud assets which allows brokers to finish duties quicker. When a activity finishes, Ona routinely deletes the sandbox. This can be a cleanup step that native environments usually skip, leaving credentials or delicate knowledge uncovered.
Safety guardrails inbuilt
Ona’s platform can block particular functions even when they’re renamed, moved, or embedded in a script. It makes use of hashing, which generates a novel cryptographic signature for each program directors want to limit. That signature identifies a blocked software no matter its file identify or location. Further guardrails stop brokers from studying file system paths that maintain encryption keys and different credentials. Outbound connections to suspected malicious servers are blocked as effectively.
Codex will get a long-running activity enhance
OpenAI plans to combine Ona’s know-how into Codex. The assistant, which already helps prolonged coding classes by way of fashions like GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, will achieve the power to run agent duties spanning hours or days inside Ona’s persistent cloud atmosphere. Customers will have the ability to evaluate progress and supply enter throughout these classes. The Ona workforce will be a part of the Codex workforce to guide the combination. It’ll kind a counterweight to the likes of Claude Code, whereas additionally increasing OpenAI’s choices for enterprises that may in any other case have chosen public cloud infrastructure reminiscent of Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform or Microsoft Agent Framework.
Codex, at any fee, has surpassed 5 million weekly customers. A serious replace earlier this 12 months pushed the assistant past pure code era towards broader growth workflows, together with non-technical duties. Given the comparatively restricted pool of builders, the 5 million determine is spectacular. An estimate from last year put the determine at 47 million builders globally.
The Ona deal follows OpenAI’s acquisition of Astral in March. This was additionally geared toward strengthening Codex for Python builders. OpenAI has made six acquisitions in 2026, practically matching its eight for all of 2025 by June this 12 months. Though not technically an acquisition, OpenAI additionally recruited the founding father of OpenClaw to advance long-running and collaborative agent architectures.