OpenAI Bought a Whole Company So Codex Could Code 25 Hours After You Close Your Laptop

OpenAI has announced the acquisition of Ona, formerly known as Gitpod GmbH, a move designed to dramatically extend the autonomous operational capabilities of its Codex AI coding agent. This strategic purchase, announced on June 11, 2026, aims to overcome a significant limitation of current AI coding tools: their inability to sustain long-running tasks once the user's local machine is closed or disconnected. Ona's core offering is its cloud-based sandbox technology, which provides secure and persistent environments for development. By integrating this technology, OpenAI intends to allow Codex agents to continue working on complex software development projects for hours or even days, uninterrupted, even after a developer has closed their laptop. This capability is crucial for tackling large-scale tasks such as modernizing codebases, patching vulnerabilities across an entire system, or working through extensive backlogs, which are impractical for session-bound local agents. The acquisition signals a notable shift in the evaluation of AI coding tools, moving beyond traditional performance metrics like SWE-bench scores to prioritize the "task horizon" – the length of time an AI agent can effectively remain on-task without human intervention. The article highlights a documented instance where a Codex agent ran for approximately 25 hours, processing about 13 million tokens and generating around 30,000 lines of code autonomously. This demonstrates the potential for significantly increased developer productivity by enabling the delegation of more ambitious and time-consuming projects. Furthermore, the integration of Ona's technology will facilitate the deployment of Codex agents in production environments with enhanced security and control. Ona's expertise in providing secure, isolated environments ensures that agents can access necessary tools and systems while maintaining data integrity and audit trails within a customer's own cloud infrastructure. This aspect is particularly important for enterprise adoption, where data governance and security are paramount. The acquisition also complements OpenAI's recent introduction of "Automations," allowing for scheduled or event-driven agent tasks, further solidifying Codex's evolution into a more independent and capable software engineering partner.