OpenAI will acquire Astral, the team behind popular Python developer tools uv, Ruff, and ty. The deal is meant to accelerate Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding platform, which already has over two million weekly active users. Astral’s open-source products will continue to be supported after the acquisition closes. If true, it would meaningfully expand OpenAI’s open-source contributions, as it has stopped offering most of its models in this fashion for years.
OpenAI has announced it will acquire Astral, a company that has carved out a significant role in the Python developer community with three widely adopted open-source tools: uv, Ruff, and ty. Together, these handle dependency management, linting and formatting, and type checking. They thus cover much of what Python developers need to maintain a clean and efficient codebase. All three are written in Rust, which gives them a speed advantage over older Python-based alternatives.
The acquisition is subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions. Until the deal closes, OpenAI and Astral will operate as separate companies. After closing, the Astral team will join the Codex team at OpenAI.
Codex growth drives the deal
Codex, OpenAI’s AI-powered coding assistant, has grown rapidly. The platform now counts over two million weekly active users, with 3x user growth and 5x usage increase since the start of the year. Since its launch, OpenAI has steadily expanded Codex beyond simple code generation. GPT-5.2-Codex targeted professional software engineering workflows, while GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is remarkably swift thanks to it running on Cerebras hardware for ultra-fast inferencing.
Bringing Astral into OpenAI further adds to Codex’s capabilities. OpenAI’s stated goal is to move Codex from an AI that generates code toward a system that can participate in the full development workflow, planning changes, running tools, verifying results, and maintaining software. Astral’s tools sit directly in those workflows, used by millions of Python developers every day.
Open source commitment stays intact
OpenAI has stated it will continue to support Astral’s open-source products after closing. Astral founder and CEO Charlie Marsh said: “As part of Codex, we’ll continue evolving our open source tools to push the frontier of software development.”
uv on GitHub has accumulated over 500 contributors and received hundreds of updates, reflecting substantial community traction. Whether deeper integration with Codex changes how these tools evolve for independent developers remains to be seen. In addition, future Codex variants of GPT models are not expected to be open-sourced either, meaning much of Astral’s future capacities will likely become ingrained with the closed-source LLMs from OpenAI.
Regardless, OpenAI is adding to its offering for the most popular programming language globally today. Python has also become one of the most widely used languages specifically for AI, data science, and backend development. Thibault Sottiaux, Codex Lead at OpenAI, said the aim is to make Codex “the agent most capable of working across the entire software developer lifecycle.”