Openai Agents Sdk

OpenAI's official agent SDK (successor to Swarm) is a lightweight, production-grade framework for multi-agent systems — agents, tools, handoffs, guardrails, and built-in tracing in a minimal API surface. The handoff mechanism (one agent hands off to another specialist agent) is particularly clean. Built to work natively with OpenAI models and the Responses API, with hooks for other providers. Fast adoption given OpenAI developer trust. Confidence is docs-derived.

Python SDK: pip install openai-agents. agent = Agent(name, instructions, tools=[...], handoffs=[other_agent]). result = await Runner.run(agent, user_input). Tools defined with @function_tool decorator. Guardrails: input/output validation hooks. Tracing: built-in trace export to OpenAI dashboard or custom OTLP endpoint. Streaming: Runner.run_streamed() for token-level streaming. Handoff: agent.handoff_to(other_agent) triggers specialist agent.

OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable or passed to model. API key from OpenAI platform. HTTPS enforced. Model-level auth follows OpenAI standard. Non-OpenAI model support via model parameter override. Open-source MIT license.

Agent execution failures surface as Python exceptions. Guardrail violations: GuardrailTripwireTriggered exception — configurable behavior. Handoff loops: max_turns parameter prevents infinite handoff loops. OpenAI API reliability tracked separately. Tool call failures: RetryError with configurable retry count. Active GitHub (openai/openai-agents-python) maintained by OpenAI engineers.

openai.github.io/openai-agents-python covers quickstart, agents/tools/handoffs/guardrails concepts, tracing, and advanced patterns. Getting started: pip install openai-agents, first agent in under 5 minutes. Official OpenAI docs also cover the SDK. Community via OpenAI developer forum and GitHub. Rapid feature development expected given official support.