Credit: Getty Images | Vincent Feuray

OpenAI announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open source Python development tools such as uv, Ruff, and ty, and integrate the company into its Codex team.

The deal, whose financial terms were not publicly disclosed, will help OpenAI “accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle,” the company said in an announcement post. Integrating Astral’s tools more closely with Codex after the acquisition will “enable AI agents to work more directly with the tools developers already rely on every day,” it continued.

Astral’s most popular open source projects include:

• uv, a Rust-based Python package manager that helps manage the complex web of dependencies in Python coding environments (attracted over 126 million monthly downloads)
• Ruff: A Python linter and code formatter (179 million monthly downloads)
• Ty: A fast Python type-checker, currently in beta (19 million monthly downloads)

Charlie Marsh, who founded Astral three years ago with $4 million in seed funding, promised in a blog post Thursday that OpenAI “will continue supporting our open source tools after the deal closes. We’ll keep building in the open, alongside our community – and for the broader Python ecosystem – just as we have from the start.” OpenAI echoed that, following the close of the acquisition, saying it will “continue to support these open source projects while exploring ways they can work more seamlessly with Codex.”

OpenAI’s move comes amid an intense battle between Codex and Anthropic’s Claude Code for dominance in the fast-growing market for AI-powered coding assistants. Back in November, Anthropic acquired Bun, a JavaScript runtime with 7 million monthly downloads that the company said would lead to “faster performance, improved stability, and new capabilities” after its integration into Claude Code.

Earlier this month, OpenAI acquired Promptfoo, the makers of an open source security tool focused on LLMs.