Swarm
Swarm is an experimental cookbook framework released by OpenAI in 2024 that demonstrated lightweight multi-agent patterns — primarily handoffs and shared context — without the production hardening of a full SDK. It was conceptually replaced in 2025 by the OpenAI Agents SDK, which preserves the agent-plus-handoff mental model and adds guardrails, tracing, structured outputs, async support, and built-in tools. Swarm remains a useful reference for the simplest possible multi-agent loop but should not be the foundation of new production code, since the production-grade replacement preserves the same core abstractions.
Example
A Swarm-era multi-agent triage demo would define agents with handoff references to other agents; conversation control would transfer between them as the LLM decided — without built-in guardrails, structured outputs, or production tracing. Teams who built on Swarm typically migrated to the Agents SDK to get the production features without rewriting the agent-plus-handoff core that Swarm originally established.
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