# openai-building-agents Agents ====== Learn how to build agents with the OpenAI API. Agents represent **systems that intelligently accomplish tasks**, ranging from executing simple workflows to pursuing complex, open-ended objectives. OpenAI provides a **rich set of composable primitives that enable you to build agents**. This guide walks through those primitives, and how they come together to form a robust agentic platform. Overview -------- Building agents involves assembling components across several domains—such as **models, tools, knowledge and memory, audio and speech, guardrails, and orchestration**—and OpenAI provides composable primitives for each. |Domain|Description|OpenAI Primitives| |---|---|---| |Models|Core intelligence capable of reasoning, making decisions, and processing different modalities.|o1, o3-mini, GPT-4.5, GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini| |Tools|Interface to the world, interact with environment, function calling, built-in tools, etc.|Function calling, Web search, File search, Computer use| |Knowledge and memory|Augment agents with external and persistent knowledge.|Vector stores, File search, Embeddings| |Audio and speech|Create agents that can understand audio and respond back in natural language.|Audio generation, realtime, Audio agents| |Guardrails|Prevent irrelevant, harmful, or undesirable behavior.|Moderation, Instruction hierarchy| |Orchestration|Develop, deploy, monitor, and improve agents.|Agents SDK, Tracing, Evaluations, Fine-tuning| |Voice agents|Create agents that can understand audio and respond back in natural language.|Realtime API, Voice support in the Agents SDK| Models ------ |Model|Agentic Strengths| |---|---| |o1 and o3-mini|Best for long-term planning, hard tasks, and reasoning.| |GPT-4.5|Best for agentic execution.| |GPT-4o|Good balance of agentic capability and latency.| |GPT-4o-mini|Best for low-latency.| Large language models (LLMs) are at the core of many agentic systems, responsible for making decisions and interacting with the world. OpenAI’s models support a wide range of capabilities: * **High intelligence:** Capable of [reasoning](/docs/guides/reasoning) and planning to tackle the most difficult tasks. * **Tools:** [Call your functions](/docs/guides/function-calling) and leverage OpenAI's [built-in tools](/docs/guides/tools). * **Multimodality:** Natively understand text, images, audio, code, and documents. * **Low-latency:** Support for [real-time audio](/docs/guides/realtime) conversations and smaller, faster models. For detailed model comparisons, visit the [models](/docs/models) page. Tools ----- Tools enable agents to interact with the world. OpenAI supports [**function calling**](/docs/guides/function-calling) to connect with your code, and [**built-in tools**](/docs/guides/tools) for common tasks like web searches and data retrieval. |Tool|Description| |---|---| |Function calling|Interact with developer-defined code.| |Web search|Fetch up-to-date information from the web.| |File search|Perform semantic search across your documents.| |Computer use|Understand and control a computer or browser.| Knowledge and memory -------------------- Knowledge and memory help agents store, retrieve, and utilize information beyond their initial training data. **Vector stores** enable agents to search your documents semantically and retrieve relevant information at runtime. Meanwhile, **embeddings** represent data efficiently for quick retrieval, powering dynamic knowledge solutions and long-term agent memory. You can integrate your data using OpenAI’s [vector stores](/docs/guides/retrieval#vector-stores) and [Embeddings API](/docs/guides/embeddings). Guardrails ---------- Guardrails ensure your agents behave safely, consistently, and within your intended boundaries—critical for production deployments. Use OpenAI’s free [Moderation API](/docs/guides/moderation) to automatically filter unsafe content. Further control your agent’s behavior by leveraging the [instruction hierarchy](https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/guardrails/), which prioritizes developer-defined prompts and mitigates unwanted agent behaviors. Orchestration ------------- Building agents is a process. OpenAI provides tools to effectively build, deploy, monitor, evaluate, and improve agentic systems. ![Agent Traces UI in OpenAI Dashboard](https://cdn.openai.com/API/docs/images/orchestration.png) |Phase|Description|OpenAI Primitives| |---|---|---| |Build and deploy|Rapidly build agents, enforce guardrails, and handle conversational flows using the Agents SDK.|Agents SDK| |Monitor|Observe agent behavior in real-time, debug issues, and gain insights through tracing.|Tracing| |Evaluate and improve|Measure agent performance, identify areas for improvement, and refine your agents.|EvaluationsFine-tuning| Get started ----------- Get started by installing the [OpenAI Agents SDK for Python](https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python) via: ```text pip install openai-agents ``` Explore the [repository](https://github.com/openai/openai-agents-python) and [documentation](https://openai.github.io/openai-agents-python/) for more details.