How Will OpenAI's Ona Acquisition Transform AI?

On June 11, 2026, OpenAI announced its plans to acquire Ona, the AI software engineering automation company formerly operating as Gitpod. The strategic acquisition plans aim to absorb Ona's advanced cloud execution and secure orchestration technology, supercharging OpenAI's Codex ecosystem as the company shifts heavily toward enterprise-grade, autonomous AI development.

The company said weekly Codex users have jumped 400% this year to over 5 million as the tool expands from helping programmers to automating complex work for everyone. Because Codex now handles big projects taking hours or days instead of minutes, OpenAI wants users to be able to hand off a task and walk away.

Ona offers virtual workspaces that let AI agents run for days with all the tools they need. The acquisition frees Codex from being stuck on a single device or active session, making it safer and easier for businesses to deploy autonomous AI in production, the company said.

“Ona brings the building blocks agents need for enterprise work: trusted, customer-controlled cloud environments where work continues across devices, inside the systems where software actually lives. OpenAI brings frontier intelligence, product polish, and a scale of research and distribution we could never reach alone,” said Johannes Landgraf, CEO & Co-Founder of Ona.

Ona Boosts Codex Capabilities

OpenAI said that Ona’s experience moving 2 million developers into secure cloud environments is key to the next phase of Codex. This technology will allow AI agents to keep working inside a company’s secure cloud even when user laptops are closed.

According to OpenAI, organizations must be able to confidently deploy long-running AI agents within environments that fully comply with their corporate security and governance standards.

The company also said that this feature is provided by Ona’s customer-controlled execution model that allows agents to operate inside an organization’s native cloud environment, while OpenAI manages the underlying intelligence and orchestration, giving complete control over the organization’s infrastructure and data without limiting Codex’s capabilities.

OpenAI and Ona will operate independently until the acquisition passes regulatory approvals. Once finalized, the Ona team will join OpenAI to build secure, long-running AI tools for big businesses. Together, they will enhance Codex's ability to safely take on major, multi-day engineering tasks like running tests, fixing code bugs, and managing complex corporate workflows, while keeping corporate data secure inside the client's own cloud.

Landgraf said that “Agents need more than intelligence; they need a trusted workspace. We built Ona to give agents cloud environments with the context, control and collaboration enterprises require. Joining OpenAI lets us bring that foundation into Codex, helping organizations deploy agents with confidence and giving humans more agency over their work.”

OpenAI is transforming from a model provider into a full-scale systems integrator. On May 11, 2026, the company launched the $4 billion OpenAI Deployment Company to embed engineers directly into client workflows. This was followed on June 14, 2026, by a $150 million Partner Network with firms like Accenture and Bain to certify 300,000 specialists.