- OpenAI confirms plans to acquire Ona and its agentic AI infrastructure
- Codex could benefit from Ona’s infrastructure, which provides environments for long-running tasks
- Both companies have seen big increases in agentic AI users this year, marking a big shift
OpenAI has announced plans to acquire Ona, a startup focused on AI agents and their required environments, which could see the company absorbed by OpenAI’s Codex team.
Under the proposed agreement, OpenAI will gain even more expertise to help AI agents work on long-running tasks that can even last for days.
This comes as more organizations do agent work over longer periods, hence the demand for more sustainable infrastructure.
OpenAI announces plans to acquire Ona
“[Ona’s] the technology provides secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems and context they need to progress over time,” OpenAI said in a release.
Ona builds secure cloud environments where AI agents can access enterprise tools and systems, preserve context, and continue to execute even when a use closes their laptop or browser. The deal would effectively give OpenAI’s Codex access to the infrastructure layer that allows agents to keep working much, much longer.
The ChatGPT maker also noted that Codex is evolving from a coding assistant into a much broader tool that helps more types of workers — it now has five million weekly users. Ona also noted a 13x increase in weekly sessions since the beginning of the year, signaling great appetite for the technology.
After years of developing high-performance frontier models, OpenAI appears to finally be at the stage where it is now expanding investments to provide agents with the right tools, memory and environments, signaling a major shift from generative AI to agent AI.
“After the closing, we are excited to join the Codex team and continue to build towards a future where artificial intelligence accelerates the economy and helps every team and every organization work more securely, faster and more collaboratively,” said CEO Johannes Landgraf, referring to the regulatory approval needed to proceed.
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