OpenAI is acquiring Ona, formerly known as Gitpod, a startup that lets AI agents run in cloud-based sandboxes rather than on local developer machines. The deal strengthens Codex, OpenAI’s software development assistant, giving it the ability to handle tasks that take hours or days without interruption from a workstation shutdown. This kind of workflow is currently dominated by Anthropic inside enterprises, meaning OpenAI feels the need to strike back by hiring top talent and tech.
Running multi-day AI coding tasks is something ill-suited to local hardware. Ona solves this by moving agent workloads into persistent cloud sandboxes. These sandboxes stay online even after the developer’s machine shuts down, allowing multi-day tasks to continue uninterrupted.
The company also pitches cloud compute as a speed advantage. Ona’s sandboxes draw on cloud resources which enables agents to complete tasks faster. When a task finishes, Ona automatically deletes the sandbox. This is a cleanup step that local environments often skip, leaving credentials or sensitive data exposed.
Security guardrails built in
Ona’s platform can block specific applications even if they are renamed, moved, or embedded in a script. It uses hashing, which generates a unique cryptographic signature for every program administrators wish to restrict. That signature identifies a blocked application regardless of its file name or location. Additional guardrails prevent agents from reading file system paths that hold encryption keys and other credentials. Outbound connections to suspected malicious servers are blocked as well.
Codex gets a long-running task boost
OpenAI plans to integrate Ona’s technology into Codex. The assistant, which already supports extended coding sessions through models like GPT-5.1-Codex-Max, will gain the ability to run agent tasks spanning hours or days inside Ona’s persistent cloud environment. Users will be able to review progress and provide input during these sessions. The Ona team will join the Codex team to lead the integration. It will form a counterweight to the likes of Claude Code, while also expanding OpenAI’s options for enterprises that might otherwise have chosen public cloud infrastructure such as Google’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform or Microsoft Agent Framework.
Codex, at any rate, has surpassed five million weekly users. A major update earlier this year pushed the assistant beyond pure code generation toward broader development workflows, including non-technical tasks. Given the relatively limited pool of developers, the five million figure is impressive. An estimate from last year put the figure at 47 million developers globally.
The Ona deal follows OpenAI’s acquisition of Astral in March. This was also aimed at strengthening Codex for Python developers. OpenAI has made six acquisitions in 2026, nearly matching its eight for all of 2025 by June this year. Although not technically an acquisition, OpenAI also recruited the founder of OpenClaw to advance long-running and collaborative agent architectures.