OpenAI to acquire Ona

Today we’re announcing that OpenAI will acquire Ona⁠(opens in a new window), bringing its secure cloud execution and orchestration technology into our rapidly expanding Codex ecosystem.

More than 5 million people use Codex each week to research, analyze, build, and automate their work—up 400% from earlier this year. Codex began as a tool for software developers and now helps a wider range of people do complex work from an initial request through to a finished result.

As Codex becomes more capable, its most valuable work is unfolding over hours or days, rather than minutes. We believe people should be able to delegate more ambitious work without remaining tied to the machine where it began. The work should continue beyond the initial session, with Codex making it possible to stay connected and check progress, provide direction, make decisions, and review results from anywhere.

Ona will help us do that. Its technology provides secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems, and context they need to make progress over time.

By bringing Ona to OpenAI, we will expand Codex beyond work tied to a single device or active session and help more organizations deploy agents securely in production.  

Ona has spent years helping developers move software development from local machines into the cloud. The company has helped 2 million developers work in secure, reproducible cloud environments and supports multiple shared customers. 

That experience is directly relevant to the next phase of Codex, enabling agents to continue working inside a customer’s cloud environment even when laptops are closed.

As organizations move from experimenting with agents to deploying them across production workflows, capable models are only one part of what they need.

Organizations should be able to give people the benefits of persistent agentic work with confidence, knowing agents are operating inside environments that meet their security, governance, and operational requirements. That means having control over where they run, what they can access, how credentials are scoped, how activity is logged, and how work moves through review.

Ona’s customer-controlled execution model will allow agents to operate inside an organization’s own cloud environment while OpenAI provides the intelligence and orchestration that power the experience. This gives organizations greater control over their infrastructure, data, and security boundaries without limiting what Codex can accomplish.

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including receipt of required regulatory approvals. Until closing, OpenAI and Ona will remain separate and independent companies. 

After closing, the Ona team will join OpenAI and work with the Codex team to advance secure, persistent enterprise execution capabilities and help scale Codex to more enterprises worldwide.

We’re excited to welcome the Ona team to OpenAI as we build AI systems that help people and businesses create and accomplish more while meeting the security and control requirements of real-world deployment. Together, we will help engineering teams safely take on sustained work across the software lifecycle, from running tests and resolving issues to modernizing applications, addressing vulnerabilities, and supporting complex workflows over time.