OpenAI has reached an agreement to acquire Astral, a developer of Python programming tools, as it seeks to advance its AI coding platform Codex and address increasing competition from Anthropic.
Neither company has disclosed the financial terms of the transaction.
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Astral’s catalogue of developer tools will be integrated into OpenAI’s Codex system following the completion of the deal.
Based in Brooklyn, New York, Astral develops utilities for Python development, including uv, a Python package and project manager, and Ruff, a linter and formatter.
Astral’s founder and CEO Charlie Marsh officially launched the company in April 2023. During the same time, the Python toolmaker secured $4m in seed funding led by Accel, along with backing from Caffeinated Capital, Guillermo Rauch of Vercel, Solomon Hykes of Docker, and David Cramer of Sentry.
Since its public release, Astral’s tools are claimed to have seen adoption across a broad segment of the Python community.
OpenAI, supported by Microsoft, introduced Codex last year and has reported over two million weekly active users, which is a threefold increase since January. Usage has risen fivefold in the same period.
Meanwhile, Anthropic’s Claude Code product has gained momentum among software developers, prompting OpenAI to expand its coding tool offerings. Earlier this year, OpenAI released a desktop application for Codex.
Marsh said: “I started Astral to make programming more productive. From the beginning, our goal has been to build tools that radically change what it feels like to work with Python – tools that feel fast, robust, intuitive, and integrated.
“Today, we’re taking a step forward in that mission by announcing that we’ve entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.”
Marsh highlighted that Astral’s tools have scaled from no users to hundreds of millions of downloads per month across Ruff, uv, and ty. He noted that the toolchain has become a core part of Python development and that its growth and impact have surpassed his initial expectations.
He further said that OpenAI intends to continue supporting Astral’s open source tools and maintain development alongside the existing community. Marsh also indicated that AI is rapidly changing software development and that by joining OpenAI, the Astral team will focus on advancing Codex, improving integration with their tools, and broadening their impact within the software development sector.
Recently, OpenAI announced $110bn in new investment at a $730bn pre-money valuation. Funding participants include SoftBank ($30bn), Nvidia ($30bn), and Amazon ($50bn).
The ChatGPT developer also entered into strategic agreements involving Amazon for partnership and Nvidia for next-generation inference compute infrastructure. Additional investors are expected as fundraising continues.
OpenAI reports more than nine million paying business users on ChatGPT for workflows spanning engineering, support, finance, sales and operations functions. The platform claims over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million consumer subscribers.
