OpenAI buys Ona to let Codex agents run while your laptop is closed

OpenAI announced on June 11 that it is acquiring Ona, the German cloud development company that used to be called Gitpod. The Ona team and its infrastructure will move onto Codex once the deal closes. Terms were not disclosed.

OpenAI says the point of the deal is to give Codex a place to live when your laptop is shut. Today, Codex runs inside an editor or a short-lived sandbox that ends with the session. Ona provides pre-configured, isolated cloud environments where an agent can keep working on a long task across hours or days, with the tools, repos, and context it needs already set up. The pitch is that this turns Codex from an in-editor assistant into a backend system that can pick up a multi-step job, run tests, open PRs, and hand back results when you check on it.

OpenAI also dropped fresh numbers: Codex is now at more than 5 million weekly users, up about 400% from earlier in the year. It cited a 13x jump in 2026 in enterprise use of Ona-style agent environments. The Ona staff will join the Codex team after the transaction closes.

Why it matters

If you build with Codex, this is the cloud-runtime question being answered, and it puts OpenAI squarely against Anthropic's Claude Managed Agents on the long-running agent surface. For teams: expect Codex to start charging for compute time, not just tokens, and start planning for agents that own background work between your check-ins instead of waiting in a chat window.