OpenAI updates its Agents SDK to help enterprises build safer, more capable agents

Agentic AI is the tech industry’s newest success story, and companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to give enterprises the tools they need to create these automated little helpers. To that end, OpenAI has now updated its agents software development toolkit (SDK), introducing a number of new features designed to help businesses create their own agents that run on the backs of OpenAI’s models.

The SDK’s new capabilities include a sandboxing ability, which allows the agents to operate in controlled computer environments. This is important because running agents in a totally unsupervised fashion can be risky due to their occasionally unpredictable nature.

With the sandbox integration, agents can work in a siloed capacity within a particular workspace, accessing files and code only for particular operations, while otherwise protecting the system’s overall integrity.

Relatedly, the new version of the SDK also provides developers with an in-distribution harness for frontier models that will allow those agents to work with files and approved tools within a workspace, the company said. (In agent development, the “harness” is a term that refers to the other components of an agent besides the model that it’s running on. An in-distribution harness often allows companies to both deploy and test the agents running on frontier models, which are considered to be the most advanced, general-purpose models available.)

“This launch, at its core, is about taking our existing agents SDK and making it so it’s compatible with all of these sandbox providers,” Karan Sharma, who works on OpenAI’s product team, told TechCrunch.

The hope is that this, paired with the new harness capabilities, will allow users “to go build these long-horizon agents using our harness and with whatever infrastructure they have,” he said.

Such “long-horizon” tasks are generally considered to be more complex and multi-step work.

OpenAI said it will continue to expand the Agents SDK over time, but initially, the new harness and sandbox capabilities are launching first in Python, with TypeScript support planned for a later release. The company said it’s also working to bring more agent capabilities, like code mode and subagents, to both Python and TypeScript.

The new Agents SDK capabilities are being offered to all customers via the API, and will use standard pricing.