OpenAI Swarm

Open Source

Lightweight, stateless multi-agent orchestration for seamless autonomous handoffs.

Capabilities: Agent Handoffs Task Decomposition Tool Execution Multi-Agent Routing

9.5

Protocol Reliability Score

Overview

OpenAI Swarm is a highly ergonomic, experimental framework designed for orchestrating multi-agent systems. Unlike heavier orchestration frameworks that rely on complex state management or memory abstractions, Swarm focuses on two core primitives: Routines and Handoffs. By 2026, Swarm has established itself as the industry standard for low-latency, stateless agentic workflows, allowing developers to define 'Agents' as simple sets of instructions and tools that can transition control to other agents dynamically. The architecture is built on top of the Chat Completions API, making it natively compatible with function calling and the latest GPT-4o models. Swarm’s technical value lies in its 'hand-off' mechanism, where an agent can return another agent's instance to signify a transfer of responsibility, mimicking a human organizational structure. This makes it ideal for high-volume environments where maintaining long-term state within the orchestration layer would introduce unnecessary overhead and latency. While classified as experimental by OpenAI, it serves as the architectural blueprint for developers building scalable, production-grade agent swarms that require transparency and predictable execution paths without the 'black box' complexity of more automated, recursive agents.