OpenAI buys Astral

OpenAI posted the announcement on March 19, 2026 and said it will keep Astral’s open‑source projects supported while folding the team into its Codex group; the post also says Codex now has more than 2 million weekly active users and has seen 3x user growth and a 5x increase in usage since the start of the year. (openai.com) Astral’s founder and CEO Charlie Marsh published a company blog post thanking investors and describing the move as “a step forward” for the team’s mission; the post names Accel partner Casey Aylward and Andreessen Horowitz’s Jennifer Li as lead investors. (astral.sh) Multiple outlets report that financial terms were not disclosed and that the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approval, meaning both firms will operate independently until close. (bloomberg.com) Astral’s projects are implemented in Rust and marketed for extreme speed: the uv package manager’s docs advertise installs 10–100× faster than pip, and Ruff’s documentation says it can replace many linters/formatters while running tens-to-hundreds of times faster. (docs.astral.sh) Licensing on the key repos is permissive — uv is dual‑licensed Apache‑2.0 or MIT and Ruff is released under the MIT license — which preserves the legal ability for the community to fork and maintain the code. (docs.astral.sh) Early community discussion has been vocal: a Hacker News thread opened immediately after the announcement debating agentic integrations and vendor control, and independent technologists including Simon Willison publicly raised governance and investor‑windfall concerns. (news.ycombinator.com) Reporting frames the acquisition as part of an intensifying push for AI‑native developer infrastructure, with analysts and outlets noting OpenAI’s move to give Codex tighter access to the tools that run Python workflows as rivals build competing coding assistants. (bloomberg.com)