The big news this morning: Astral to join OpenAI (on the Astral blog) and OpenAI to acquire Astral (the OpenAI announcement). Astral are the company behind uv, ruff, and ty - three increasingly load-bearing open source projects in the Python ecosystem. I have thoughts!

The official line from OpenAI and Astral

The Astral team will become part of the Codex team at OpenAI.

Charlie Marsh has this to say:

Open source is at the heart of that impact and the heart of that story; it sits at the center of everything we do. In line with our philosophy and OpenAI's own announcement, OpenAI will continue supporting our open source tools after the deal closes. We'll keep building in the open, alongside our community -- and for the broader Python ecosystem -- just as we have from the start. [...]

After joining the Codex team, we'll continue building our open source tools, explore ways they can work more seamlessly with Codex, and expand our reach to think more broadly about the future of software development.

OpenAI's message has a slightly different focus (highlights mine):

As part of our developer-first philosophy, after closing OpenAI plans to support Astral’s open source products. By bringing Astral’s tooling and engineering expertise to OpenAI, we will accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle.

This is a slightly confusing message. The Codex CLI is a Rust application, and Astral have some of the best Rust engineers in the industry - BurntSushi alone (Rust regex, ripgrep, jiff) may be worth the price of acquisition!

So is this about the talent or about the product? I expect both, but I know from past experience that a product+talent acquisition can turn into a talent-only acquisition later on.

uv is the big one

Of Astral's projects the most impactful is uv. If you're not familiar with it, uv is by far the most convincing solution to Python's environment management problems, best illustrated by this classic XKCD:

Switch from python to uv run and most of these problems go away. I've been using it extensively for the past couple of years and it's become an essential part of my workflow.

I'm not alone in this. According to PyPI Stats uv was downloaded more than 126 million times last month! Since its release in February 2024 - just two years ago - it's become one of the most popular tools for running Python code.

Ruff and ty

Astral's two other big projects are ruff - a Python linter and formatter - and ty - a fast Python type checker.

These are popular tools that provide a great developer experience but they aren't load-bearing in the same way that uv is.

They do however resonate well with coding agent tools like Codex - giving an agent access to fast linting and type checking tools can help improve the quality of the code they generate.

I'm not convinced that integrating them into the coding agent itself as opposed to telling it when to run them will make a meaningful difference, but I may just not be imaginative enough here.

What of pyx?

Ever since uv started to gain traction the Python community has been worrying about the strategic risk of a single VC-backed company owning a key piece of Python infrastructure. I wrote about one of those conversations in detail back in September 2024.

The conversation back then focused on what Astral's business plan could be, which started to take form in August 2025 when they announced pyx, their private PyPI-style package registry for organizations.

I'm less convinced that pyx makes sense within OpenAI, and it's notably absent from both the Astral and OpenAI announcement posts.

Competitive dynamics

An interesting aspect of this deal is how it might impact the competition between Anthropic and OpenAI.

Both companies spent most of 2025 focused on improving the coding ability of their models, resulting in the November 2025 inflection point when coding agents went from often-useful to almost-indispensable tools for software development.

The competition between Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex is fierce. Those $200/month subscriptions add up to billions of dollars a year in revenue, for companies that very much need that money.

Anthropic acquired the Bun JavaScript runtime in December 2025, an acquisition that looks somewhat similar in shape to Astral.

Bun was already a core component of Claude Code and that acquisition looked to mainly be about ensuring that a crucial dependency stayed actively maintained. Claude Code's performance has increased significantly since then thanks to the efforts of Bun's Jarred Sumner.

One bad version of this deal would be if OpenAI start using their ownership of uv as leverage in their competition with Anthropic.

Astral's quiet series A and B

One detail that caught my eye from Astral's announcement, in the section thanking the team, investors, and community:

Second, to our investors, especially Casey Aylward from Accel, who led our Seed and Series A, and Jennifer Li from Andreessen Horowitz, who led our Series B. As a first-time, technical, solo founder, you showed far more belief in me than I ever showed in myself, and I will never forget that.

As far as I can tell neither the Series A nor the Series B were previously announced - I've only been able to find coverage of the original seed round from April 2023.

Those investors presumably now get to exchange their stake in Astral for a piece of OpenAI. I wonder how much influence they had on Astral's decision to sell.

Forking as a credible exit?

Armin Ronacher built Rye, which was later taken over by Astral and effectively merged with uv. In August 2024 he wrote about the risk involved in a VC-backed company owning a key piece of open source infrastructure and said the following (highlight mine):

However having seen the code and what uv is doing, even in the worst possible future this is a very forkable and maintainable thing. I believe that even in case Astral shuts down or were to do something incredibly dodgy licensing wise, the community would be better off than before uv existed.

Astral's own Douglas Creager emphasized this angle on Hacker News today:

All I can say is that right now, we're committed to maintaining our open-source tools with the same level of effort, care, and attention to detail as before. That does not change with this acquisition. No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed. That makes the worst-case scenarios have the shape of "fork and move on", and not "software disappears forever".

I like and trust the Astral team and I'm optimistic that their projects will be well-maintained in their new home.

OpenAI don't yet have much of a track record with respect to acquiring and maintaining open source projects. They've been on a bit of an acquisition spree over the past three months though, snapping up Promptfoo and OpenClaw (sort-of, they hired creator Peter Steinberger and are spinning OpenClaw off to a foundation), plus closed source LaTeX platform Crixet (now Prism).

If things do go south for uv and the other Astral projects we'll get to see how credible the forking exit strategy turns out to be.

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Folks who work at finding solutions to the local news crisis are understandably frustrated at what a difficult, frustrating slog it can be. Earlier this week, Elizabeth Hansen Shapiro, the former executive director of the National Trust for Local News, gave Richard J. Tofel a preview of a report she’s written for Press Forward and said, “I think the challenges now are so systemic that the only way to do responsible, impactful funding going forward is to look at system solutions rather than newsroom-based ones.”

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I’m looking forward to reading Hansen Shapiro’s report. (She’s featured in our book, “What Works in Community News,” and has been on our podcast.) And yet there really is no substitute for solving this problem one community at a time. For all the talk you hear about scale, that’s really not the way to go unless you’re talking about obvious things like finding a common tech platform so that every local news publisher doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel — or, in this case, the content management system. In the early days of the hyperlocal news movement, a group of publishers got together and formed an organization called Authentically Local. Its spot-on message: “Local Doesn’t Scale.”

Authentically Local is no longer around, but other organizations — especially LION (Local Independent Online News) Publishers — have risen up to take its place. LION current lists 445 members, many of them tiny hyperlocals comprising one, two or three people. And yes, LION provides its members with ideas for common solutions, but fundamentally its members are independent,  locally based entrepreneurs, for-profit and nonprofit, who are engaged in the hard but rewarding job of bringing news and information to their communities.

What brings all of this to mind is the growing perception that AI can help solve the local news gap. To some extent, it can if used responsibly and ethically. As I wrote recently, I think Chris Quinn is taking it too far at Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer. By turning over the task of actually writing stories to AI, he’s eliminating the vitally important work of having the journalists who reported those stories sift through the nuances and emphasis points that readers need. But at least he says he’s enforcing some ethical guidelines, the most important of which is human review before publication.

I wonder, though, if that’s going to be the case at Patch. Liz Skalka reports for the Columbia Journalism Review that the nationwide network of local news sites is embracing AI in a big way, using AI to produce newsletters that “rely heavily on aggregation, automated event calendars, and posts from Nextdoor.” She quotes Patch chief executive Warren St. John as saying “This is a utility. This is not the high church of journalism. This is about creating a foothold in a relationship and meeting a need.” I find it a little difficult to see exactly what need is being met. I mean, Nextdoor posts?

Patch has been through several iterations and ownership changes over the years. At one time, maybe 12 to 15 years ago, Patch had one actual journalist in each community it covered, and they would go out and cover stories; I recall encountering a Patch editor who was working out of a Borders bookstore. I still see some of that in our local Patch, although each site now covers multiple communities. And in New Hampshire, Tony Schinella continues to provide award-winning coverage for Patch. But I have to wonder how long that will continue with Patch’s new AI overlords taking charge. Maybe they’ll do both. I hope so.

A happier story is told by Alexandra Bruell in The Wall Street Journal. Bruell reports on news organizations that are using AI to extend the reach of their actual journalists. Among them: The Philadelphia Inquirer, a for-profit regional daily owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute. She writes:

Reporters are using artificial-intelligence tools to scan community meetings for topics that may prompt news, such as a zoning issue related to an ICE detention facility and a proposal for a new data center. The effort is partly funded by a partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft and the nonprofit Lenfest Institute, which owns the Inquirer.

Using AI to ferret out stories that reporters can then follow up on is exactly the sort of task that is best handled by robots. Bruell adds that AI “promises a way to monitor police scanners and town meetings — the time-consuming bread and butter of much local journalism — more efficiently, and even opens the door to expanding coverage.” Indeed, that’s exactly what’s happening at the Midcoast Villager in Camden, Maine, where the paper’s small staff is using AI to summarize governmental meetings in the 43 towns it covers to see what might be worth the intervention of a human journalist.

The need for local solutions to local problems is greater than ever because of another AI phenomenon: its incorporation into Google search. Google now produces AI-generated summaries in response to queries, and even though those results include links, most users don’t bother to click. Never mind that the answers may be flat-out wrong.

Anna Nicolaou of the Financial Times reported last week that magazine publisher Condé Nast has been hit with such a drop in incoming traffic that Google will soon be inconsequential to its magazines, which include titles such as The New Yorker and Vogue. How bad is it? Over the past year, chief executive Roger Lynch said, Google has declined from providing a majority of incoming traffic to just 25%. Yet Condé Nast’s revenues actually grew in 2025, Lynch said, mainly because of the company’s success in selling digital subscriptions.

Which brings me back to where I started. Condé Nast may not be engaged in the local news business, but it’s succeeding by building direct relationship with its audiences. At the local level, publishers need to move beyond tech platforms, which were never their friends, and serve their communities. Every farmer’s market is an opportunity to sign people up for their newsletters. For-profits need to get readers to subscribe — and give them a reason to do so. Nonprofits need to drive voluntary membership fees. Events bring people together and raise visibility.

Publishers can learn from each other and develop best practices, but ultimately they need to apply these lessons in a way that makes sense for their own individual projects.

Local doesn’t scale.