TL;DR
OpenAI announced the Agents API public beta on September 10, 2026, letting developers create a managed, cloud-hosted AI agent environment with a single API call, built on the Codex harness, with no extra API fee during the beta.
Event overview
On September 10, 2026, OpenAI announced the public beta of Agents API, which allows developers to call a cloud-hosted AI agent runtime managed by OpenAI. The service reuses the agent execution framework and infrastructure behind Codex; developers specify tasks, models, tools and runtimes to build AI applications that execute multi-step work. OpenAI said agents can run code in the cloud, handle files, save intermediate results and run tasks spanning hours or even days, and that a single API call creates a production-grade agent.
Key facts
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Announcement | September 10, 2026 |
| Products | Agents API public beta + OpenAI Hosted Sandbox |
| Foundation | Open-source Codex execution framework |
| Capabilities | Cloud code execution, file handling, intermediate results; tasks spanning hours to days |
| Sandbox options | OpenAI-hosted, or partners incl. Blaxel, Cloudflare, Daytona, DigitalOcean, E2B, Modal, Oracle, Runloop, Vercel |
| Multi-agent | Parallel subtasks, up to 3 concurrent sub-agents |
| Pricing | No extra API fee in beta; pay per model tokens and tool usage |