OpenAI's Astral Acquisition Is Still Stuck in Regulatory Limbo After 7 Months
OpenAI announced its roughly $750M acquisition of Astral, the maker of uv and Ruff, back in March. Seven months later the deal still has not closed. Here is what the delay says about AI M&A.
Seven months is a long time in AI. Long enough for model generations to turn over, for funding rounds to double, for entire product categories to appear. It is also, as it turns out, not long enough to close the acquisition of a Python tooling startup. OpenAI announced the Astral acquisition on March 19, 2026, bringing the makers of uv, Ruff, and ty into its Codex organization. As of this week, the deal is still pending, subject to regulatory approval and customary closing conditions, with no closing date announced. The Python toolchain's biggest deal is stuck in the waiting room.
The price was never officially disclosed, but secondary reporting puts it around $750 million. For a company whose last known round was a $32 million Series A, that is a staggering multiple, and a loud validation of open-source developer tools as an asset class. Astral did not sell a product with revenue to match that number. It sold the thing every Python developer touches daily.
The Astral acquisition, seven months on
To be fair to both sides, the limbo has not been idle. Both companies committed to keeping uv, Ruff, and ty open source, and Astral has kept shipping through the wait: uv 0.13.0 and 0.13.1 (defaulting to Python 3.15), Ruff 0.17.0 and 0.17.1 (signed release artifacts, Python 3.15 support), plus documentation for ty's incremental analysis. The tools got better while the lawyers talked. Founder and CEO Charlie Marsh is expected to fold his team into the Codex organization, which Thibault Sottiaux leads, once the deal closes. If it closes.
The strategic logic was clear from day one and has only sharpened since. Codex now counts over 2 million weekly active users, triple its January figure, and it is competing directly with Anthropic's Claude Code for the AI coding assistant crown. Owning the Python toolchain layer, package management, linting, type checking, lets OpenAI wire its agent loop (lint, type-check, resolve dependencies) directly into Codex instead of shelling out to third-party tools. It is vertical integration for the agent era: own the loop, own the developer.
The open-source question nobody can answer yet
Here is the thing the community keeps circling. uv and Ruff became standards partly because they were neutral: fast, independent, everybody's tools. Post-acquisition, the open question is whether they stay neutral across AI platforms or whether Codex workflows quietly get preferential treatment: first-class integrations, faster feature support, subtle defaults that nudge you toward OpenAI's stack.
Both companies have promised the tools stay open source and independent in spirit. Promises are cheap during regulatory review, when everyone is on best behavior. The real test comes after closing, when roadmap decisions start favoring one ecosystem. Developers have seen this movie before, with every beloved independent tool that got acquired. Sometimes the acquirer is a good steward. Sometimes the tool becomes a funnel. There is no way to know which Astral gets until the deal actually closes and a year of commits tells the story.
What the delay says about AI deals
Step back and the seven-month limbo is the real story. This is about as friendly a deal as exists in tech: no hostile bid, no competing suitor, both sides publicly committed, tools still shipping. And it still cannot get through the regulatory door in seven months. That tells you everything about the current climate for Big AI acquisitions.
Regulators on multiple continents have decided that AI capability is strategic infrastructure, and they are scrutinizing deals that would have sailed through in 2021. A $750M acqui-hire of a dev-tools company getting this treatment means the bar has moved for everything: the Intuit acquisition of Sequence sailed through at a smaller scale, but anything touching frontier AI labs now gets the full treatment. Salesforce's $5.66B Braze deal will be watched as the next test case.
For startup founders, the lesson is sobering. The exit path to Big AI still exists, but the timeline just got longer and less certain, which changes the math on every term sheet. And Wall Street is already asking harder questions about AI spending. A $750M deal that cannot close in seven months is a reminder that in 2026, even the winners have to wait in line.
