Agents are said to be the future of artificial intelligence, and now OpenAI is trying to help developers create their own agents. The company is releasing a new Responses API that offers developers the building blocks to create agents that can search the web, dig through files, and perform tasks on a computer on their behalf.
“There are some agents that we can build ourselves, such as Deep Research and Operator,” Olivier Gaudemand, head of product at OpenAI, tells The Verge. “But the world is so complex, there are so many industries and use cases… and so we’re really excited to provide these basics, these building blocks for developers to build the best agents for their use case, their needs.”
The Responses API comes with a web search tool built on the same model as ChatGPT, allowing developers to retrieve information and quotes from the web in real time when using GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini. It also has a computer-assisted feature that similarly uses the company’s Operator model to perform tasks on behalf of the user. The Responses API also has a tool for searching through large volumes of documents, with OpenAI billing it as a way to help customer service agents sift through FAQs or for a legal assistant to find previous cases.
Along with the Responses API, OpenAI also announced the Agents SDK, which it describes as a way for developers to “orchestrate” the workflow of AI agents. “The Responses API is an atomic unit of using models and tools to perform certain actions,” Nikunj Handa, product manager on OpenAI’s API team, tells The Verge. “In the Agents SDK, several such atomic units work together to solve even more complex problems.” This should make it easier for developers to manage all of their agents and ensure that they are working towards a single goal.
The deployment of the Responses API and Agents SDK builds on existing tools that OpenAI offers developers, including the Chat Completion API, which allows developers to build artificial intelligence tools that offer a response to user queries. OpenAI also plans to replace its Assistants API with the Responses API in mid-2026. The company claims to have “incorporated key improvements into the Responses API” using developer feedback on the Assistants API.
