---
type: entity
subtype: tool
title: "OpenAI Agents SDK"
description: "OpenAI's agent framework, which their guide leans on heavily with code examples."
resource: "https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/"
tags: [agent-framework, multi-agent, openai, sdk]
videos: [google-anthropic-and-openais-guides-to-ai-agents-all-in-18-minutes, openais-brand-new-agents-sdk-crash-course]
created: 2026-07-21
updated: 2026-07-21
---

# OpenAI Agents SDK

The OpenAI Agents SDK is OpenAI's production-oriented framework for building agentic apps, and Cole frames it as Swarm grown up: "now OpenAI has released their brand new agent SDK it's built on top of swarm and still completely free and open source but they claim that it is now production ready" [0:00:15]. Where [OpenAI Swarm](./openai-swarm.md) was explicitly experimental, the Agents SDK is the version OpenAI stands behind for real use. Its selling point is minimal ceremony, "very easy to use to build full agentic AI apps with very few abstractions" [0:00:34], which is exactly the low-abstraction quality Cole prizes in an agent framework.

It is also the framework OpenAI itself teaches from. In his roundup of the major vendor agent guides, he notes "OpenAI talks a lot about their agents SDK and they have a lot of code examples in their guide based on the agents SDK" [0:15:59], so understanding the SDK is effectively the on-ramp to OpenAI's whole agent philosophy. The SDK ships the pieces a multi-agent system needs out of the box: handoffs for [agent teams](../../concepts/agent-teams.md), [guardrails](../../concepts/guardrails.md), sessions for [memory](../../concepts/memory-systems.md), tracing for [observability](../../concepts/agent-observability.md), and a built-in [agent loop](../../concepts/agent-loop.md). Cole specifically calls out that its handoffs are far cleaner than assembling the same behavior elsewhere, "setting it up with something like LangChain would be a lot more complicated to get these handoffs configured" [0:18:17].

His verdict is genuinely positive, ranking it above peers, "I do like it more than CrewAI and LangChain" [0:28:35], while staying loyal to his own stack, "I'm still going to be using Pydantic AI and LangGraph but watching this closely" [0:31:03]. So the Agents SDK earns respect as a clean, production-ready option, especially for teams already in the OpenAI ecosystem, even as Cole keeps Pydantic AI and LangGraph as his defaults.

## Realizes

- [Agent Teams](../../concepts/agent-teams.md) - Coordinating multiple specialized agents, via orchestrators, routers, and handoffs, to solve a task no single agent handles well.
- [The Agent Loop (Reason-Act-Observe)](../../concepts/agent-loop.md) - The core agentic cycle where the LLM reasons, calls a tool, observes the result, and loops an unknown number of times until it decides to respond.
- [Guardrails](../../concepts/guardrails.md) - Constraints and checks that keep agents from hallucinating, going off the rails, or emitting unsafe output.
- [Memory Systems](../../concepts/memory-systems.md) - Giving agents durable short- and long-term memory so conversations, user context, and facts persist across sessions and users.
- [Human in the Loop](../../concepts/human-in-the-loop.md) - Keeping a human as the approver and steerer of agentic work rather than fully automating, so AI augments engineers instead of replacing them.
- [Agent Observability](../../concepts/agent-observability.md) - Instrumenting agents with tracing, logging, and cost/token metrics so you can see and debug what they actually did.

## Contrasts with

- [CrewAI](./crewai.md) - Multi-agent framework named as one of the interchangeable backends AG-UI supports.
- [LangChain](./langchain.md) - The framework used in prior masterclass videos to build the Asana agent; its message objects and invoke/stream methods underpin the chatbot logic.

## Related

- [OpenAI Swarm](./openai-swarm.md) - OpenAI's experimental multi-agent framework for building teams of agents that hand off to each other; defaults to OpenAI models but accepts a custom client.
- [Pydantic AI](./pydantic-ai.md) - Cole's framework for the individual agents, structured around three parts: dependencies, the agent definition, and tools.
- [LangGraph](./langgraph.md) - The orchestration framework wiring agents into a stateful graph of nodes and edges, used here to run agents in parallel and add human-in-the-loop.

## Sources

- [OpenAI's BRAND NEW Agents SDK (Crash Course)](../../sources/openais-brand-new-agents-sdk-crash-course.md) - "[0:00:15] now OpenAI has released their brand new agent SDK it's built on top of swarm and still completely free and open source but they claim that it is now production ready"
- [OpenAI's BRAND NEW Agents SDK (Crash Course)](../../sources/openais-brand-new-agents-sdk-crash-course.md) - "[0:00:34] very easy to use to build full agentic AI apps with very few abstractions"
- [OpenAI's BRAND NEW Agents SDK (Crash Course)](../../sources/openais-brand-new-agents-sdk-crash-course.md) - "[0:18:17] setting it up with something like LangChain would be a lot more complicated to get these handoffs configured"
- [Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI's Guides to AI Agents ALL in 18 Minutes](../../sources/google-anthropic-and-openais-guides-to-ai-agents-all-in-18-minutes.md) - "[0:15:59] OpenAI talks a lot about their agents SDK and they have a lot of code examples in their guide based on the agents SDK."
