OpenAI has announced plans to acquire Ona, a company that builds secure cloud-based development environments. The deal aims to make OpenAI’s AI-powered coding and automation platform,Codex, more useful. Codex has grown rapidly in recent months. OpenAI says more than 5 million people now use the platform every week, a 400 percent increase compared to earlier this year.
According to OpenAI, the way people use Codex is changing. Instead of completing jobs in a few minutes, users are increasingly asking AI agents to work on projects that can take hours or even days. “We believe people should be able to delegate more ambitious work without remaining tied to the machine where it began,” OpenAI said in a blogpost.
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This is where Ona’s technology comes in. “Ona will help us do that. Its technology provides secure, persistent environments where agents can access the tools, systems, and context they need to make progress over time,” the AI company said. “By bringing Ona to OpenAI, we will expand Codex beyond work tied to a single device or active session and help more organisations deploy agents securely in production.”
Ona has helped around 2 million developers work in secure and reproducible cloud environments. OpenAI believes that expertise will help improve Codex. “That experience is directly relevant to the next phase of Codex, enabling agents to continue working inside a customer’s cloud environment even when laptops are closed,” it said.
As businesses move from testing AI agents to deploying them in real-world operations, security and control become important. OpenAI says organisations need to know where AI agents are running, what systems they can access, how credentials are managed, and how activity is monitored.
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“Ona’s customer-controlled execution model will allow agents to operate inside an organisation’s own cloud environment,” OpenAI said. This means companies will be able to keep greater control over their infrastructure, data and security while still using Codex’s AI capabilities.
The acquisition is still subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions. Until the deal is completed, OpenAI and Ona will continue operating as separate companies. Once the acquisition is done, Ona’s team will join OpenAI and work alongside the Codex team.