OpenAI is acquiring Astral, the company behind the widely used Python tools Ruff, uv, and ty. Astral founder Charlie Marsh announced that his team is joining OpenAI's Codex team, the company's platform for agentic AI coding. According to Marsh, Astral's tools are downloaded hundreds of millions of times each month and have become a core part of modern Python development. Marsh says integrating them with Codex gives both projects the most room to grow. Astral was backed by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.
Our goal with Codex is to move beyond AI that simply generates code and toward systems that can participate in the entire development workflow—helping plan changes, modify codebases, run tools, verify results, and maintain software over time. Astral’s developer tools sit directly in that workflow.
OpenAI
OpenAI says it will keep the tools open source after the acquisition closes. Astral's Douglas Creager wrote on Hacker News that the tools are under a permissive license, so in a worst-case scenario, the community could fork the software and continue developing it independently.
No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed.
Douglas Creager
