{"slug": "openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep", "title": "OpenAI Buys Ona to Make Sure Codex Never Has to Sleep", "summary": "OpenAI announced on June 11 that it will acquire Ona, the German cloud startup formerly known as Gitpod, to integrate its cloud workspace technology into the Codex coding agent. Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, up 400% since the start of the year, with about one in five users being non-developers. The acquisition aims to let Codex agents run in customers' own virtual private clouds, addressing enterprise security concerns and competing with Anthropic's Claude Code.", "body_md": "*OpenAI has agreed to acquire Ona, the German cloud startup formerly known as Gitpod, so its Codex coding agents can keep working after you've closed your laptop.*\n\nOpenAI announced on June 11 that it would acquire Ona, folding a company most developers still know by its old name, Gitpod, into the Codex organization. The deal hasn't closed yet. It's waiting on regulatory approval and paperwork. OpenAI still hasn't said what it paid. But the logic behind it is plain: Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, up 400% since the start of the year, according to OpenAI's own numbers. A growing share of them, roughly one in five according to Forbes, aren't developers at all. They're using it for research, analysis and general office work. An agent that ambitious can't live inside a browser tab that closes when you shut your laptop.\n\nThat's the gap Ona fills. Before the rebrand, Gitpod ran browser-based development environments and says it had served 2 million developers over its history. Late last year it rebuilt itself around AI agents and renamed itself Ona. The pivot was total. What it sells now, per Forbes' reporting on the deal, is three things bolted together. First, sandboxed cloud workspaces defined in code. Second, background agents that pick up a task and hand back a finished pull request. And third, a layer of guardrails - audit trails, role-based access, deployment inside a customer's own virtual private cloud. That's built for companies that won't hand an autonomous agent the keys without some way to watch what it's doing.\n\nThat last part is the actual point of the acquisition. A bank, a pharmaceutical company, a sovereign wealth fund - none of them want an AI agent running unsupervised on a vendor's servers for two days straight. Ona lets the agent run inside the customer's own cloud instead. That way the company keeps control of the infrastructure, the data and the security boundary, while OpenAI keeps control of the model. Ona co-founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf and his team are expected to join OpenAI's Codex group once the deal closes.\n\n## The rival it's actually chasing\n\nLook at who OpenAI is actually racing. Forbes reports the acquisition is aimed squarely at Anthropic's Claude Code, which has built real traction inside engineering teams. It also notes both companies have quietly filed confidential paperwork toward a public listing. Owning the execution layer, not just the model that writes the code, is how OpenAI tries to make switching away from Codex expensive.\n\nIt isn't the only infrastructure land grab happening in AI coding this year. Five days after the Ona news, SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor's parent company, Anysphere, for $60 billion in stock. It's an all-stock deal, announced days after SpaceX's own IPO, expected to close sometime in the third quarter, according to CNBC and TechCrunch. Cursor had crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue back in November. That's serious money. It was reportedly closing in on a separate $2 billion round at a $50 billion valuation before SpaceX moved in. Meanwhile Cognition, the company behind the autonomous agent Devin, has pushed its own valuation to $26 billion. It has also rebranded its Windsurf editor as Devin Desktop, betting that owning the IDE around the agent matters as much as the agent itself.\n\n## The open question\n\nNone of these companies are fighting over who writes the best autocomplete anymore. They're fighting over where the agent actually lives, whose servers it runs on, and who gets paid when it runs for six hours instead of six seconds.\n\nThat's the real fight.\n\nOpenAI's answer, at least for enterprise customers, is to let the agent live wherever the customer already trusts: inside their own cloud, with OpenAI's guardrails wrapped around it. That's the pitch. Whether it holds up once Ona sits inside OpenAI, rather than running as an independent vendor, is a different question. Forbes raised the obvious concern: will a coding-infrastructure company owned by a model maker stay neutral? Or will it quietly start favouring Codex over rivals that used to run on the same rails? OpenAI hasn't said. Until the deal closes and Ona ships its first product update under new ownership, nobody outside the company really can.\n\n**Also read:** [A UK Government Test Caught an AI Agent Faking Identities to Hack GitHub](https://startupfortune.com/a-uk-government-test-caught-an-ai-agent-faking-identities-to-hack-github/) • [Trump Meets AI Giants While Senate Democrats Call His AI Policy Unpredictable](https://startupfortune.com/trump-meets-ai-giants-while-senate-democrats-call-his-ai-policy-unpredictable/) • [Ninth Circuit Says Perplexity's Comet Can Shop on Amazon Again](https://startupfortune.com/ninth-circuit-says-perplexitys-comet-can-shop-on-amazon-again/)", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep", "canonical_source": "https://startupfortune.com/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep/", "published_at": "2026-08-05 02:35:05+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-05 02:54:29.135103+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure", "ai-agents", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["OpenAI", "Ona", "Gitpod", "Codex", "Anthropic", "Claude Code", "SpaceX", "Anysphere"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/openai-buys-ona-to-make-sure-codex-never-has-to-sleep.jsonld"}}