OpenAI has opened up its platform to the developer community, as it seeks to reinforce its leading position in the AI sector after the surprising arrival of Chinese competitors.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday “new tools for building agents,” as the AI pioneer continues evolving its “platform to help developers and enterprises build useful and reliable agents.”

AI agents are designed to independently execute complex real-world tasks without direct human intervention.

AI agents

In January 2025 for example, OpenAI had launched its first AI agent (called ‘Operator’) in the United States which is designed to automate everyday web tasks for users.

‘Operator’ uses its own web browser to accomplish tasks that a user gives it. This could remove the need for a user for example to do their online shopping, book a holiday or restaurant reservation, or just fill out forms.

It later expanded the Operator agent to additional countries for ChatGPT Pro subscribers in Australia, Brazil, Canada, India, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, the UK, and more countries.

Then in February OpenAI also launched an AI agent called ‘Deep Research’.

OpenAI said that the Deep Research agent can emulate the work of a research analyst for areas including finance, science, policy and engineering, carrying out in “tens of minutes” what would take a human “many hours”.

Developer tools

Now OpenAI has opened itself to the developer community.

“Today, we’re releasing the first set of building blocks that will help developers and enterprises build useful and reliable agents,” said OpenAI. “We view agents as systems that independently accomplish tasks on behalf of users. Over the past year, we’ve introduced new model capabilities – such as advanced reasoning, multimodal interactions, and new safety techniques – that have laid the foundation for our models to handle the complex, multi-step tasks required to build agents.”

“However, customers have shared that turning these capabilities into production-ready agents can be challenging, often requiring extensive prompt iteration and custom orchestration logic without sufficient visibility or built-in support,” said the firm.

“To address these challenges, we’re launching a new set of APIs and tools specifically designed to simplify the development of agentic applications,” it said.

The new developer tools include:

• The new Responses API, combining the simplicity of the Chat Completions API with the tool use capabilities of the Assistants API for building agents;
• Built-in tools including web search, file search, and computer use;
• The new Agents SDK to orchestrate single-agent and multi-agent workflows;
• Integrated observability tools to trace and inspect agent workflow execution

OpenAI said these new tools streamline core agent logic, orchestration, and interactions, making it significantly easier for developers to get started with building agents.

Over the coming weeks and months, OpenAI said it plans to release additional tools and capabilities to further simplify and accelerate building agentic applications on its platform.