What is the OpenAI Agents SDK?
The OpenAI Agents SDK is a lightweight, production-focused framework for building AI agents with built-in support for tool calling, agent handoffs, guardrails, and tracing — designed to work with OpenAI's models.
WHY IT MATTERS
OpenAI's Agents SDK (formerly Swarm) takes a minimalist approach to agent building. The core primitives are agents (with instructions and tools), handoffs (transferring control between agents), and guardrails (input/output validation). That's it.
This simplicity is intentional. Rather than providing abstractions for every possible pattern, the SDK gives you composable building blocks. Agents are just configurations — instructions, tools, and optional handoff targets. The runner handles the execution loop.
The SDK includes built-in tracing for observability, making it straightforward to debug agent behavior in production. For financial applications, the tracing capabilities provide the audit trail needed to understand why an agent made a particular decision.
HOW POLICYLAYER USES THIS
PolicyLayer works with the OpenAI Agents SDK by wrapping financial tools with policy checks. When an agent calls a payment tool, PolicyLayer validates the transaction before execution — adding spending controls to the SDK's lightweight agent loop.