OpenAI SwarmExperimental open-source framework for lightweight multi-agent orchestration using handoffs and routines

OpenAI Swarm is an experimental, educational framework released by OpenAI for building and orchestrating multi-agent systems. Rather than serving as a production-ready library, it was published primarily to demonstrate ergonomic patterns for coordinating multiple agents, with an emphasis on simplicity and transparency over feature breadth. The framework is built around two core abstractions: agents and handoffs. An agent in Swarm encapsulates a set of instructions (its system prompt or "routine") and a collection of functions (tools) it can call. Handoffs allow one agent to transfer control of a conversation to another agent by returning that agent from a function, enabling specialized agents to take over different parts of a task. This makes it straightforward to model workflows like triage-and-route, where one agent classifies a request and passes it to the appropriate specialist. Swarm is stateless between calls and runs client-side, using the OpenAI Chat Completions API under the hood. It manages the loop of calling the model, executing returned tool calls, and updating context variables that can be shared across agents. Because it does not maintain server-side state, developers retain full visibility and control over conversation history and context passing. The project is aimed at developers and researchers who want to learn or prototype multi-agent coordination patterns. Its lightweight design makes it easy to read the entire codebase and understand exactly how the orchestration works, which is valuable for educational purposes and for teams designing their own agent architectures. Notably, OpenAI has positioned Swarm as experimental and not intended for production use, and its concepts have largely been superseded by the OpenAI Agents SDK, which is the recommended production-grade successor. As such, Swarm is best understood as a reference implementation and learning resource rather than a maintained framework for building real applications.