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OpenAI Agrees to Buy Ona to Give Codex Secure, Persistent Cloud Execution

The deal is meant to let Codex run longer, production-grade AI agents inside customer-controlled cloud environments to meet enterprise security and governance needs.

Overview

  • OpenAI announced on Thursday, June 11 that it has agreed to acquire Ona and that the transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals with financial terms undisclosed.
  • Ona’s engineering team will join OpenAI and be embedded in the Codex group after closing to build the integration and operate the secure execution layer.
  • Ona’s platform uses Virtual Private Cloud deployments with policy enforcement and audit logging so agents can access tools and make changes such as pull requests while keeping code, credentials and logs inside a customer’s cloud.
  • OpenAI says the move answers a shift in Codex use from short tasks to multi-step, hours- or days‑long workflows and follows rapid platform growth to more than 5 million weekly active users.
  • The acquisition continues OpenAI’s recent string of buyouts to boost enterprise capabilities and could lower the barriers for companies to run AI agents in production on AWS, GCP or other customer clouds while sharpening competition with rivals like Anthropic.