OpenAI on Wednesday introduced a new Agents API that brings the agent harness and infrastructure behind Codex to developers, potentially giving enterprises a way to build custom AI agents while removing much of the orchestration and infrastructure management traditionally required to make such agents work.
That reduction in engineering complexity is possible because the Agents API is a managed service, with OpenAI hosting and maintaining the underlying harness and infrastructure.
Previously, developers building a custom agent typically had to assemble the components needed to support its work, including an agent runtime, context and session management, tools and external data connections, execution environments, and associated infrastructure.
OpenAI itself already offers several of those building blocks through products such as its Responses API, which developers could use to combine models with built-in capabilities including web search, file search and computer use, and its Agents SDK for defining and orchestrating agent workflows.
Agents API, which is currently in public beta, in contrast, can help developers design a custom agent in a single API call after they specify the task, model, tools, and the environment, the model provider wrote in a blog post.
