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OpenAI Agents SDK

by OpenAIUpdated Jun 15, 2025

OpenAI's official SDK for building production-ready agents with managed infrastructure, tool use, handoffs between specialized agents, and built-in guardrails. It provides a minimal yet powerful set of primitives: Agents, Handoffs, Guardrails, and a Runner to orchestrate everything.

Architecture Overview

The SDK is built around an Agent class that bundles instructions, tools, and model configuration. A Runner orchestrates the agentic loop, invoking the model, processing tool calls, and managing handoffs between agents. Guardrails run in parallel with the main agent to validate inputs and outputs, enabling safe multi-step execution.

When to Use OpenAI Agents SDK

Production AI assistants with handoffs
Tool-augmented chatbots and copilots
Enterprise workflows with guardrails
Multi-agent systems with specialized roles
Customer support automation pipelines

Strengths & Weaknesses

Strengths

Deep OpenAI model integration and optimization
Built-in guardrails for input/output validation
Elegant handoff mechanism between specialized agents
Tracing and observability out of the box
Minimal abstraction with maximum control

Weaknesses

OpenAI model lock-in by default (requires adapters for other providers)
Python-only SDK at launch
Smaller plugin ecosystem compared to LangChain

Quick Start

python

from agents import Agent, Runner, function_tool

@function_tool
def get_weather(city: str) -> str:
    """Get the current weather for a city."""
    return f"The weather in {city} is sunny, 72°F."

weather_agent = Agent(
    name="Weather Assistant",
    instructions="You are a helpful weather assistant. Use the get_weather tool to answer questions about weather.",
    tools=[get_weather],
)

# Run the agent
result = Runner.run_sync(weather_agent, "What's the weather in Tokyo?")
print(result.final_output)

Features at a Glance

Developer	OpenAI
Language	Python
License	MIT
GitHub Stars	15k+
MCP Support	Yes
Multi-Agent	Yes

Notable Users

OpenAIStripeShopifyKlarna

Resources

Official Documentation

https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/

GitHub Repository

https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python

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