OpenAI is releasing new tools and APIs to help developers build agentic experiences.
“We believe agents will soon become integral to the workforce, significantly enhancing productivity across industries. As companies increasingly seek to leverage AI for complex tasks, we’re committed to providing the building blocks that enable developers and enterprises to effectively create autonomous systems that deliver real-world impact,” OpenAI wrote in a post.
The company announced the Responses API, which allows developers to more easily integrate OpenAI’s tools into their own applications.
“As model capabilities continue to evolve, we believe the Responses API will provide a more flexible foundation for developers building agentic applications. With a single Responses API call, developers will be able to solve increasingly complex tasks using multiple tools and model turns,” OpenAI wrote.
The Responses API comes with several built-in tools, including:
- Web search, which allows for retrieval of information from the Internet
- File search, which allows for retrieval of information from large volumes of documents
- Computer use, which captures mouse and keyboard actions generated by a model so that developers can automate computer tasks.
According to OpenAI, the Responses API “combines the simplicity of Chat Completions with the tool-use capabilities of the Assistants API.” The company plans to continue supporting and developing the Chat Completions API, but will work on getting full feature parity between the Responses API and Assistants API and then start to deprecate the Assistants API, with a scheduled sunset date in mid 2026. Until it formally announces the deprecation, the company will continue adding features to the Assistants API. “The Responses API represents the future direction for building agents on OpenAI,” the company said.
OpenAI also announced the Agents SDK, which is an open source tool for orchestrating multi-agent workflows. Last year, the company has released an experimental tool called Swarm for this purpose, and OpenAI says the Agents SDK offers many improvements over Swarm, including:
- Agents that can be easily configured
- Handoffs to intelligently transfer control between agents
- Guardrails for input and output validation
- Tracing and observability of agent execution traces
According to OpenAI, the Agents SDK can be used for a variety of scenarios, including customer support automation, multi-step research, content generation, code review, and sales prospecting.
It works with the Responses API and the Chat Completions API, and can also be used with third-party models that use a Chat Completions style API endpoint. It works now only in Python codebases, but support for Node.js will be available soon.
“With today’s releases, we’re introducing the first building blocks to empower developers and enterprises to more easily build, deploy, and scale reliable, high-performing AI agents. As model capabilities become more and more agentic, we’ll continue investing in deeper integrations across our APIs and new tools to help deploy, evaluate, and optimize agents in production. Our goal is to give developers a seamless platform experience for building agents that can help with a variety of tasks across any industry,” the company wrote.
