OpenAI announced on March 19, 2026 that it will acquire Astral, the company behind three of Python’s most widely used open-source developer tools: uv, Ruff, and ty. Astral’s team will join OpenAI’s Codex division.
Astral founder Charlie Marsh started the company in 2022 with $4 million in seed funding and a team now roughly 30 engineers strong. Those engineers built tools that millions of developers use daily. Ruff is a Python linter (a tool that catches code errors automatically) written in Rust, praised for being significantly faster than older alternatives. uv is a package manager that handles Python environments and dependencies. ty is a type checker, still in active development.
What Astral Brings to Codex
OpenAI’s goal for Codex goes beyond an AI that writes code on demand. The company wants Codex to participate in the full development cycle: planning changes, modifying codebases, running tools, checking results, and maintaining software over time. Astral’s tooling fits directly into that loop. An AI agent that can also lint, package, and type-check code natively is more useful than one that just generates it.
Marsh confirmed the tools will stay open source after the deal closes. OpenAI backed that up, saying it plans to keep supporting Astral’s projects while finding ways to connect them more tightly with Codex.
What Stays Open, What Doesn’t
The open-source commitment covers existing tools like uv, Ruff, and ty. Future Codex-specific model variants, however, are not expected to be open-sourced, meaning new capabilities built on top of Astral’s work will likely stay inside OpenAI’s closed stack. The acquisition financial terms were not disclosed.
This is OpenAI’s clearest move yet into the Python developer infrastructure layer, coming as AI coding agents — tools that can handle full software tasks autonomously — become a serious part of professional development workflows in 2026.