OpenAI acquires Astral to accelerate its Codex AI coding platform

OpenAI acquired Astral, a startup behind widely used open-source Python developer tools Ruff and uv, for an undisclosed amount, with the Astral team joining OpenAI's Codex division to integrate the tools into its AI-powered coding platform. Codex currently serves over two million weekly active users and has seen a threefold increase in its user base and a fivefold surge in usage since the start of the year. The acquisition comes amid intensifying competition in AI coding tools, with Anthropic's Claude Code gaining considerable traction among enterprise customers and capturing a growing share of new AI tool spending.