At a time when the AI programming competition is in full swing, OpenAI once again demonstrated its dominance through precise "headhunting acquisitions." This Thursday, OpenAI officially announced the acquisition of the startup Astral. Although this company is small in size, it has gained great fame among developers. Its high-performance open-source tools, such as Ruff and uv, have long been a favorite among Python developers.

image.png

According to the agreement, the Astral team will be fully integrated into OpenAI. Their core mission is clear: to inject new energy into OpenAI's programming assistance product Codex. Although the exact transaction amount was not disclosed, this move is undoubtedly a strong response to competitors such as Anthropic and Cursor.

Codex is showing incredible growth, with user numbers tripling

OpenAI also revealed impressive data: the weekly active users of Codex have exceeded 2 million. More surprisingly, since early 2026, the tool's user growth rate has tripled. This explosive growth explains why OpenAI is eager to acquire Astral to optimize the software development experience, aiming to fundamentally improve programming efficiency.

The expansion strategy behind "buying"

In fact, OpenAI's ambitions go far beyond programming. From the $6.4 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's AI hardware company io in May 2025, to the recent acquisitions of the cybersecurity company Promptfoo and the healthcare technology startup Torch at the beginning of this year, OpenAI is rapidly building a comprehensive AI empire through mergers and acquisitions.

With former Google executive Albert Lee overseeing corporate development strategies, OpenAI's M&A pace is clearly accelerating. For developers, the addition of Astral may mean that future Codex will not just be a "helper" that writes code, but a more integrated system that better understands developer pain points and offers higher productivity efficiency.