OpenAI Swarm

multi-agent

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Mar 2026

Hold

OpenAI Swarm was an experimental, educational multi-agent framework released by OpenAI in late 2024. It has been superseded by the OpenAI Agents SDK, which provides the same handoff-based patterns with production-grade tracing, guardrails, and sessions.

Why It's on Hold

Swarm was explicitly labelled by OpenAI as an "educational framework exploring ergonomic, lightweight multi-agent orchestration" — not a production tool. In March 2025, OpenAI replaced it with the Agents SDK, which builds on the same conceptual primitives (agents + handoffs) but adds everything Swarm deliberately omitted:

Feature	Swarm	Agents SDK
Built-in tracing	❌	✅
Guardrails	❌	✅
Sessions	❌	✅
Human-in-the-loop	❌	✅
Production support	❌	✅
Stateless design	✅ (intentional)	Optional

When to Use Swarm

The only reason to use Swarm today is to read its source code as a learning exercise — it's deliberately minimal (~300 lines) and clearly explains the agent-handoff pattern. Once you understand the concepts, move to the Agents SDK for anything real.

Migration Path

Switch to the OpenAI Agents SDK:

pip uninstall swarm
pip install openai-agents

The concepts map directly: Swarm's Agent and handoff become Agents SDK's Agent and handoffs.