OpenAI Continues Coding Push With Astral Acquisition

OpenAI says it is acquiring Astral, a startup that creates Python tools for developers.

The deal, announced Thursday (March 19), is part of the company’s increasing focus on coding, and is designed to integrate Astral’s team with OpenAI’s Codex project.

“Our goal with Codex is to move beyond AI that simply generates code and toward systems that can participate in the entire development workflow—helping plan changes, modify codebases, run tools, verify results, and maintain software over time,” OpenAI said in its announcement.

“Astral’s developer tools sit directly in that workflow. By integrating these systems with Codex after closing, we will enable AI agents to work more directly with the tools developers already rely on every day.”

The announcement notes that Python has become a key language in modern software development, powering things like AI, data science, and developer infrastructure. Astral’s open source tools “already play a key role in that ecosystem,” OpenAI added.

These include uv, which simplifies dependency and environment management; Ruff, which offers “extremely fast” linting and formatting; and ty, which “helps enforce type safety across codebases,” the company said.

“Astral has always focused on building tools that transform how developers work with Python — helping them ship better software, faster,” said founder Charlie Marsh, adding that Astral will continue working on its open-source tools as part of OpenAI.

The announcement follows reports from earlier this week that OpenAI is halting its side projects as it focuses more on coding and business users.

Fidji Simo, the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s CEO of applications, previewed the company’s new strategy in a recent “all-hands” with employees, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported.

“We cannot miss this moment because we are distracted by side quests,” Simo said, per remarks seen by the WSJ. “We really have to nail productivity in general and particularly productivity on the business front.”

The company in the past year has rolled out several new products, like its Sora video generator, the Atlas web browser, a new hardware device and eCommerce capabilities for ChatGPT.

CEO Sam Altman has likened this push to “betting on a series of startups” inside OpenAI, the WSJ added, helping build the startup’s reputation as an AI pioneer.

But now, OpenAI is facing mounting pressure for its rival Anthropic, whose Claude Code and Cowork tools have made it popular among businesses.

OpenAI also recently announced plans to purchase Promptfoo, a startup that helps companies find vulnerabilities in AI systems during development, and integrate its technology into OpenAI Frontier, the company’s enterprise platform for building and running AI agents.