OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit on March 11, 2026 in Washington, DC.
Anna Moneymaker | Getty Images
OpenAI on Thursday announced it’s acquiring Astral, a small startup that builds popular open source tools for software developers.
Astral’s team will join OpenAI and help build out its artificial intelligence coding assistant called Codex. The companies did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.
“Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it feels like to build software,” Astral’s founder and CEO Charlie Marsh wrote in a blog post.
AI coding assistants have exploded in popularity over the last year, and OpenAI has been racing to grab users and market share from rivals like Anthropic and Cursor, which have their own buzzy offerings for developers.
OpenAI said Thursday that Codex has more than 2 million weekly active users, and that the tool has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year.
The company’s acquisition of Astral is still subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval.
OpenAI has made a number of recent acquisitions, including the $6.4 billion deal in May 2025 for Jony Ive’s AI devices startup io. The company announced earlier this month that it will purchase the cybersecurity startup Promptfoo, and it bought the health-care technology startup Torch in January.
In December, OpenAI hired Google’s Albert Lee to lead corporate development, a signal that the company will continue to hunt for M&A targets that can help it gain an edge.
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