OpenAI has announced the release of the public beta of the "Agents API," designed to assist in the construction of AI agents. This API aims to enable developers to build and deploy AI agents more rapidly.

The Agents API provides the same harness (the mechanism handling orchestration, long-running sessions, context management, etc.) used by OpenAI's "Codex" through an API. This allows developers to offload the complex processing required for agent operation—such as prompt formatting, tool usage, context management, and the management of long-running sessions—to OpenAI.

Regarding the execution environment (sandbox), in addition to those hosted by OpenAI, there are self-hosted options provided by partner companies such as Oracle, Cloudflare, and Vercel. The release also includes multi-agent capabilities to assign tasks to multiple agents for parallel processing, as well as support for MCP (Model Context Protocol).

There is no separate fee for using the Agents API itself; instead, charges are incurred based on the volume of tokens and tool usage consumed by the agents.

Source: