OpenAI to acquire developer tooling startup Astral in boost for Codex team
Summary
OpenAI is acquiring Astral, a startup that creates popular open source developer tools, to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant (a tool that uses AI to help write software automatically). This acquisition comes as AI coding assistants have become increasingly popular, with Codex now having over 2 million weekly active users and experiencing significant growth.
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Original source: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/19/openai-to-acquire-developer-tooling-startup-astral.html
First tracked: March 19, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Classified by LLM (prompt v3) · confidence: 95%