Introducing the Agents API
OpenAI, Thursday, September 10th, 2026
A managed service built on the Codex harness for orchestration, long-running sessions and tool use.
OpenAI's Agents API is a managed service powered by the Codex harness, handling orchestration, long-running sessions and tool use that developers previously assembled themselves.
Developers specify task, model, tools and execution environment in one call, with execution running in OpenAI-managed sandboxes, private infrastructure or third-party providers.
The trade-off flagged by outside analysts is vendor lock-in and limited data retention control, which matters for regulated industries. The managed layer also removes the friction that previously limited how much inference an agent could consume.