OpenAI to buy Ona, folding Gitpod's cloud sandboxes into Codex

The deal hands Codex persistent, customer-controlled execution environments so agents can keep working after developers close their laptops — and reads as a direct counter to Anthropic's self-hosted sandboxes in Claude Managed Agents.

OpenAI said Thursday it’ll acquire Ona, the German cloud-environment startup that rebranded from Gitpod in late 2025 and re-pointed itself at AI agents. Terms weren’t disclosed. The strategic logic is: Codex agents now do work that OpenAI describes as “unfolding over hours or days, rather than minutes,” and they need somewhere to keep running after the developer shuts the laptop.

Ona’s pitch is “customer-controlled execution”, sandboxes that live inside the buyer’s own cloud, with the security posture enterprise procurement actually signs off on. Ona says 2 million developers have passed through its environments since the Gitpod era. OpenAI says Codex now has more than 5 million weekly users, up 400% from earlier in the year. The infrastructure problem this solves is obvious once you see those two numbers next to each other.

Analysts read the deal narrowly. A Gartner First Take, quoted by InfoWorld, called it “OpenAI’s response to Anthropic supporting self-hosted sandboxes in Claude Managed Agents, starting May 2026,” and said Ona gives Codex “the essential scaling capability it lacked.” Conifers.ai CEO Tom Findling framed the competitive read-out: “pressure on Anthropic, especially as Claude Code gains traction with developers and enterprise buyers.” IDC’s Kevin Dayaratna pegged the unconfirmed price near “$450 million or $500 million” at a typical 30x revenue multiple.

The quotes from inside the deal stay on message. Ona co-founder and CEO Johannes Landgraf said agents “need a trusted workspace.” OpenAI’s core products lead Thibault Sottiaux said the combined stack will be “easier to deploy securely across production workflows.”

Gartner also flagged the cost: deeper platform lock-in, which buyers should price into the procurement math.

Zoom out and the pattern is legible. OpenAI has been buying capability around Codex (Promptfoo, Software Applications) and hardware ambition (Jony Ive’s io), and filed confidentially for an IPO days before the Ona announcement. The agent-infrastructure layer is being consolidated in public, on a banker’s clock, by a company that needs its developer story to look structurally complete before the roadshow.

OpenAI to buy Ona, folding Gitpod's cloud sandboxes into Codex

Sources