OpenAI is building the agent execution-and-commerce substrate, not just the model.

OpenAI agreed to acquire Ona, which provides secure cloud environments for long-running autonomous agent workflows, folding it into the Codex team so agents run "while your laptop is closed" (OpenAI). In parallel, a Visa partnership integrates payments, tokenization, and security so agents can initiate purchases on a user's behalf. Agent runtime plus agentic payments. That's the exact stack independent builders are assembling by hand right now from sandbox VMs and Stripe. OpenAI wants to be the default substrate for both. Worth watching whether that pulls the floor out from under the agent-isolation startups.