OpenAI Acquires Astral, Bringing Python Tool uv Under Its Control
OpenAI announced the acquisition of Astral on March 19, 2026, with the entire team, including founder Charlie Marsh, joining OpenAI's Codex organization. Astral was founded with the goal of rebuilding Python's toolchain in Rust, and its flagship tool uv launched in February 2024 as a faster replacement for pip and related utilities, clocking in 10 to 100 times faster than existing workflows. By early 2026, uv had surpassed 126 million monthly downloads, making it the dominant Python package manager before any formal community governance was established. Meanwhile, PEP 772, which proposed an elected Python Packaging Council, had been under review for 14 months without resolution. The acquisition means a critical piece of Python's packaging infrastructure is now owned by a major AI corporation, a shift the open-source community never formally endorsed.
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