Stacks and Flows

What Changed · Source-verified

OpenAI Agents SDK and Agents API: what changed in the stack boundary

The Agents SDK remains an application library; the newer Agents API adds a managed runtime boundary. This expands deployment choice, not the correctness of an agent's policy or output.

Verified change record

  • OpenAI maintains the Agents SDK with agents, tools, handoffs, guardrails, sessions, and tracing.
  • OpenAI describes the Agents API as a managed agent harness in public beta.
  • The API supports managed, adopter-owned, and partner environment choices.

Before

The SDK supplied orchestration primitives while the application owned the runtime and surrounding operations.

After

The Agents API offers a managed harness and environment choices, creating a second deployment path around the SDK concepts.

What did not change

Tool authorization, business acceptance criteria, data governance, and external side-effect safety remain application responsibilities.

Decision detail

  1. Keep the SDK-only approach when you need direct runtime control and can own operations.
  2. Evaluate the managed API when long-running execution and sandbox management remove meaningful platform work.
  3. Do not migrate until data boundaries, evaluation, and rollback are defined for one representative workflow.
  4. Treat public beta status as a reason to preserve reversibility, not as a reason to reject a bounded pilot.

Evidence

These claims are source-verified. We do not label this page hands-on or benchmarked because no reproducible test artifact is attached.

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