Astral to Join OpenAI

https://astral.sh/blog/openai

Astral to join OpenAI

Astral has entered into an agreement to join OpenAI as part of the Codex team.

A concern:

More and more plainly, OpenAI and Anthropic are making plays to own (and lease) the "means of production" in software. OK - I'm a pretty happy renter right now.

As they gobble up previously open software stacks, how viable is it that these stacks remain open? It seems perfectly sensible to me that these providers and their users alike have an interest in further centralizing the dev lifecycle - eg, if Claude-Code or Codex are interfaces to cloud devenvs, then the models can get faster feedback cycles against build / test / etc tooling.

But when the tooling authors are employees of one provider or another, you can bet that those providers will be at least a few versions ahead of the public releases of those build tools, and will enjoy local economies of scale in their pipelines that may not be public at all.

It's not any different from the launch of the FSF. There's a simple solution. If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

> If you don't want your lunch eaten by a private equity firm, make sure whatever tool you use is GPL licensed.

1. For the record: the GPL is entirely dependent on copyright.

2. If AI "clean-room" re-implementations are allow to bypass copyright/licenses, the GPL won't protect you.

"Clean room" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Having the entire corpus of knowledge for humanity and how LLMs work, how can you honestly argue in court that this is purely clean room implementation?

This is right up there with Meta lawyers claiming that when they torrent it's totally legal but when a single person torrents it's copyright infringement.

Far too many people treat AI as a way to launder copyright, it seems likely that a lot of the current state of outright plagiarism won't stand up in court
No IP will stand up to AI, from Star Wars to Linear. Things are about to change.

These cases will be settled out of court long before they ever reach a jury. Anthropic has agreed to pay $1.5bn in a class action suit [0]. Others will follow.

[0] https://legalblogs.wolterskluwer.com/copyright-blog/the-bart...

The Bartz v. Anthropic Settlement: Understanding America's Largest Copyright Settlement 

When Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a copyright lawsuit in August 2025, it became the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. Three authors had sued, but nearly half a million ended up in the class. And a quarter of the money will go to lawyers.

Kluwer Copyright Blog