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2025 “is going to be the year of the agent,” according to OpenAI’s chief product officer, Kevin Weil. And to that end, the company has released a new API that allows developers to build their own agents, which are capable of searching the web, scouring files or even controlling a computer.
The new Responses API basically gives developers access to some of the tools that OpenAI has offered to ChatGPT users over the past year or so. For example, the web search facility lets developer-built agents scour the web for real-time information, in the same way you can hit the “search” button to query real-time web information in ChatGPT.
Likewise, the Operator model can perform tasks on a computer on the user’s behalf. OpenAI demonstrated this using an agent to find a specific type of jacket for a customer, with the agent clicking on the necessary buttons in a web browser.
Agents will also have the ability to search files, such as customer records or a company’s stock information, thus being able to combine both public web data and private company data in its responses. Agents might, for example, be able to access a customer’s purchase history to help nudge them towards new products they might like.
The Responses API will replace the Assistants API that the company has been testing with developers for the past few months. OpenAI suggested it would be painless to transfer projects from Assistants to Responses.
Alongside Responses, OpenAI is also releasing the Agents SDK. This will give developers the ability to create apps with multiple agents capable of performing different functions.
OpenAI demonstrated this with a retail app, which had individual agents that help customers to shop, another that deals with returns and another that matches, say, shoes to their current outfits.
Each of these individual agents can have their own instruction set and access to different data. For example, the shopping agent may use web search, while a refunds agent would need access to customer order histories to validate refunds.
A “handoff” facility intelligently guides customers to the correct agent, so that if someone entered the chat and asked how they get a refund on a jacket they’ve bought, they would be (invisibly) transferred to the refunds agent to process the request.
Tools log every step of these interactions for developers to review, so they can check that the right agent is being called when users make certain requests.
Both the Responses API and Agents SDK are available to developers today.
