OpenAI's Move to Acquire Ona Will Give Codex a Persistant Cloud Workspace

OpenAI, which recently filed for IPO confidentially, is making another major move in the AI race, and this one is all about giving its agents a place to keep working long after users close their laptops. The company has announced plans to acquire Ona, a cloud infrastructure startup focused on secure execution environments. While OpenAI has been rapidly improving Codex’s intelligence, this deal is more about where those agents work.

OpenAI wants Codex working around the clock

Codex has grown far beyond its original role as a coding assistant. According to OpenAI, more than 5 million people now use Codex every week to research information, automate tasks, analyze data, and build software. The company says that figure has increased by 400% since earlier this year.

The bigger challenge, however, is that many of those tasks are no longer finished in a few minutes. OpenAI believes the next generation of AI agents will handle projects that last hours or even days. Rather than being limited to a single device or browser session, those agents need a secure place to continue working independently.

That is where Ona comes in. The startup has spent years building cloud-based development environments and has helped more than two million developers work inside secure and reproducible cloud workspaces. OpenAI plans to use that technology to let Codex continue operating inside customer-controlled cloud environments even when users are offline.

The acquisition also highlights OpenAI’s growing focus on large organizations. Rather than forcing businesses to move sensitive workloads into OpenAI-controlled systems, Ona’s infrastructure allows agents to operate inside a customer’s own cloud environment. That means organizations can maintain control over data access, security policies, credentials, logging, and compliance requirements while still taking advantage of Codex.

OpenAI says the long-term goal is to help enterprises deploy AI agents across real production workflows, including software testing, application modernization, vulnerability management, issue resolution, and other complex tasks that require continuous execution over time.

The acquisition remains subject to regulatory approval. Once completed, the Ona team will join OpenAI and work directly with the Codex division as the company steps further into enterprise AI infrastructure. Not to forget, the company is reportedly also planning to slash prices of its AI services to compete with its rivals like Anthropic.