OpenAI Buys Ona To Run Codex Agents Inside Enterprise Clouds

InnovationCloudOpenAI Buys Ona To Run Codex Agents Inside Enterprise CloudsByJanakiram MSV,Senior Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover emerging technologies with a focus on infrastructure and AIFollow AuthorJun 13, 2026, 12:58am EDTOpenAI and OnaOpenAIOpenAI has agreed to acquire Ona, a German startup that keeps software agents working in a secure cloud after the developer who started the task logs off. The deal was announced Thursday and folds Ona into Codex, OpenAI's coding agent. It points the company at a problem that better models alone have not solved.Codex now reaches more than 5 million people each week, OpenAI said, a 400% jump since the start of the year. The work it does has stretched from minutes into hours and sometimes days. Jobs that long need an execution environment to run. For most enterprises the harder question is a governance one. Will a bank or a hospital let an autonomous agent operate inside its own network, reach its data, and keep working while nobody is watching? Ona is OpenAI's answer to that question.Inside OnaTo appreciate what Ona adds, it helps to know where it came from. The company began as Gitpod, a Kiel-based developer-tools firm that moved coding off local machines and into the browser. It says it has served 2 million developers. In late 2025 it rebranded to Ona and rebuilt itself around agents.The Ona platform is built from three building blocks. The first is environments: sandboxed cloud workspaces defined in code that spin up the same way every time. The second is agents, background workers that accept a task and return a pull request, reachable from any device once the work is running. The third is a set of guardrails, the controls a security team cares about. They include audit trails, role-based access, scoped credentials and deployment inside a company's own virtual private cloud.What ties these together is an idea Ona calls customer-controlled execution....