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OpenAI to Buy Ona to Run Codex Agents Inside Customer Clouds

The acquisition is meant to let Codex execute longer, auditable agent workflows inside customer-controlled cloud environments to meet enterprise security and data-residency needs.

Overview

  • OpenAI announced the acquisition of Ona on Thursday, June 11, 2026, saying financial terms were not disclosed and the deal is subject to customary closing conditions with Ona employees joining the Codex team after close.
  • Ona builds Virtual Private Cloud deployments with policy enforcement and audit logging so AI agents run in a customer’s own cloud while every action is recorded for compliance.
  • OpenAI says integrating Ona will let Codex handle longer-running, multi-step autonomous coding tasks inside customer clouds, making it easier for organizations to deploy agents into production.
  • The purchase continues OpenAI’s recent pattern of buying specialist startups to fill product gaps as Codex grows past 5 million weekly active users, increasing pressure from rivals such as Anthropic.
  • For regulated companies, the change could mean less need to move sensitive code to third-party infrastructure because agents will execute under customer VPC and audit controls, and observers will watch for the timeline and technical details of the integration.