OpenAI just made one of its boldest counter moves against rival artificial intelligence (AI) firm Anthropic. OpenAI has officially announced it will acquire Astral, a software startup behind popular open-source Python developer tools.

Astral creates Python development tools such as uv, a package and project manager, and Ruff, a linter and formatter.

OpenAI has made several recent acquisitions, including cybersecurity startup Promptfoo and health-care technology startup Torch.

Codex is OpenAI’s cloud-based software engineering agent that can work on multiple tasks at the same time, such as answering questions about users’ codebase, fixing bugs, and more. With the acquisition,

Kie.ai''s GPT-5.4 Codex API streamlines front-end development by automating UI code generation, multi-file refactoring, and interface optimization.