OpenAI announced Thursday that it will acquire Astral, a small startup that builds popular open source tools for software developers. The Astral team will join OpenAI and help it build an artificial intelligence programming assistant called Codex. The parties did not disclose financial terms of the acquisition.
Astral founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post: "Throughout it all, however, our goal remains the same: to make programming more efficient. To build tools that fundamentally change the software development experience."
The popularity of AI programming assistants has exploded in the past year, and OpenAI has been stepping up its efforts to compete for users and market share from competitors such as Anthropic and Cursor, which also have their own products that attract developers' attention.
OpenAI said Thursday that Codex has more than 2 million weekly active users and that the tool's user growth has tripled since the beginning of the year.
OpenAI's acquisition of Astral is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals.
OpenAI has made a series of acquisitions recently, including acquiring Jony Ive’s AI device startup io for $6.4 billion in May 2025. The company announced earlier this month that it would acquire cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, and in January it acquired healthcare technology startup Torch.
In December, OpenAI hired Google's Albert Lee to lead corporate development strategy, a sign that the company will continue to look for M&A targets that can help it gain an edge.
