OpenAI Acquires Agent Runtime Company Ona
新智元 · wechat · 2026-07-04
New Intelligence reported that OpenAI officially announced the acquisition of Ona on June 11. Founded in Kiel, Germany, in 2019 as Gitpod, the 79-person team rebranded to Ona in September 2025. Positioned as a "task control center for AI Agents," it provides an execution environment where Agents can run securely in the cloud for hours or days with isolation, permission boundaries, and audit logs.
The acquisition backdrop is OpenAI directly challenging Anthropic's enterprise strength with Claude Code in the "how long can Agents work" race—OpenAI Codex's weekly active users surged from 3 million in April to 5 million. The article details the perspective of 23-year-old core engineer Siddhant Khare, who joined as an intern at 19 and was fully acquired four years later.
The article emphasizes that as Agents become more autonomous, run for days, spawn sub-Agents, and utilize credentials and codebases, context, authorization, observability, runtime security, and auditing are evolving from engineering details into critical infrastructure battlegrounds for tech giants.
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