Important
Swarm is now replaced by the OpenAI Agents SDK, which is a production-ready evolution of Swarm. The Agents SDK features key improvements and will be actively maintained by the OpenAI team.
We recommend migrating to the Agents SDK for all production use cases.
Requires Python 3.10+
pip install git+ssh://git@github.com/openai/swarm.git
or
pip install git+https://github.com/openai/swarm.git
from swarm import Swarm, Agent client = Swarm() def transfer_to_agent_b(): return agent_b agent_a = Agent( name="Agent A", instructions="You are a helpful agent.", functions=[transfer_to_agent_b], ) agent_b = Agent( name="Agent B", instructions="Only speak in Haikus.", ) response = client.run( agent=agent_a, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "I want to talk to agent B."}], ) print(response.messages[-1]["content"])
Hope glimmers brightly,
New paths converge gracefully,
What can I assist?
Swarm focuses on making agent coordination and execution lightweight, highly controllable, and easily testable.
It accomplishes this through two primitive abstractions: Agent
s and handoffs. An Agent
encompasses instructions
and tools
, and can at any point choose to hand off a conversation to another Agent
.
These primitives are powerful enough to express rich dynamics between tools and networks of agents, allowing you to build scalable, real-world solutions while avoiding a steep learning curve.
Note
Swarm Agents are not related to Assistants in the Assistants API. They are named similarly for convenience, but are otherwise completely unrelated. Swarm is entirely powered by the Chat Completions API and is hence stateless between calls.
Swarm explores patterns that are lightweight, scalable, and highly customizable by design. Approaches similar to Swarm are best suited for situations dealing with a large number of independent capabilities and instructions that are difficult to encode into a single prompt.
The Assistants API is a great option for developers looking for fully-hosted threads and built in memory management and retrieval. However, Swarm is an educational resource for developers curious to learn about multi-agent orchestration. Swarm runs (almost) entirely on the client and, much like the Chat Completions API, does not store state between calls.
Check out /examples
for inspiration! Learn more about each one in its README.
basic
: Simple examples of fundamentals like setup, function calling, handoffs, and context variablestriage_agent
: Simple example of setting up a basic triage step to hand off to the right agentweather_agent
: Simple example of function callingairline
: A multi-agent setup for handling different customer service requests in an airline context.support_bot
: A customer service bot which includes a user interface agent and a help center agent with several toolspersonal_shopper
: A personal shopping agent that can help with making sales and refunding ordersStart by instantiating a Swarm client (which internally just instantiates an OpenAI
client).
from swarm import Swarm client = Swarm()
Swarm's run()
function is analogous to the chat.completions.create()
function in the Chat Completions API – it takes messages
and returns messages
and saves no state between calls. Importantly, however, it also handles Agent function execution, hand-offs, context variable references, and can take multiple turns before returning to the user.
At its core, Swarm's client.run()
implements the following loop:
Agent
The (initial) agent to be called. (required) messages List
A list of message objects, identical to Chat Completions messages
(required) context_variables dict
A dictionary of additional context variables, available to functions and Agent instructions {}
max_turns int
The maximum number of conversational turns allowed float("inf")
model_override str
An optional string to override the model being used by an Agent None
execute_tools bool
If False
, interrupt execution and immediately returns tool_calls
message when an Agent tries to call a function True
stream bool
If True
, enables streaming responses False
debug bool
If True
, enables debug logging False
Once client.run()
is finished (after potentially multiple calls to agents and tools) it will return a Response
containing all the relevant updated state. Specifically, the new messages
, the last Agent
to be called, and the most up-to-date context_variables
. You can pass these values (plus new user messages) in to your next execution of client.run()
to continue the interaction where it left off – much like chat.completions.create()
. (The run_demo_loop
function implements an example of a full execution loop in /swarm/repl/repl.py
.)
List
A list of message objects generated during the conversation. Very similar to Chat Completions messages
, but with a sender
field indicating which Agent
the message originated from. agent Agent
The last agent to handle a message. context_variables dict
The same as the input variables, plus any changes.
An Agent
simply encapsulates a set of instructions
with a set of functions
(plus some additional settings below), and has the capability to hand off execution to another Agent
.
While it's tempting to personify an Agent
as "someone who does X", it can also be used to represent a very specific workflow or step defined by a set of instructions
and functions
(e.g. a set of steps, a complex retrieval, single step of data transformation, etc). This allows Agent
s to be composed into a network of "agents", "workflows", and "tasks", all represented by the same primitive.
str
The name of the agent. "Agent"
model str
The model to be used by the agent. "gpt-4o"
instructions str
or func() -> str
Instructions for the agent, can be a string or a callable returning a string. "You are a helpful agent."
functions List
A list of functions that the agent can call. []
tool_choice str
The tool choice for the agent, if any. None
Agent
instructions
are directly converted into the system
prompt of a conversation (as the first message). Only the instructions
of the active Agent
will be present at any given time (e.g. if there is an Agent
handoff, the system
prompt will change, but the chat history will not.)
agent = Agent( instructions="You are a helpful agent." )
The instructions
can either be a regular str
, or a function that returns a str
. The function can optionally receive a context_variables
parameter, which will be populated by the context_variables
passed into client.run()
.
def instructions(context_variables): user_name = context_variables["user_name"] return f"Help the user, {user_name}, do whatever they want." agent = Agent( instructions=instructions ) response = client.run( agent=agent, messages=[{"role":"user", "content": "Hi!"}], context_variables={"user_name":"John"} ) print(response.messages[-1]["content"])
Hi John, how can I assist you today?
Agent
s can call python functions directly.str
(values will be attempted to be cast as a str
).Agent
, execution will be transferred to that Agent
.context_variables
parameter, it will be populated by the context_variables
passed into client.run()
.def greet(context_variables, language): user_name = context_variables["user_name"] greeting = "Hola" if language.lower() == "spanish" else "Hello" print(f"{greeting}, {user_name}!") return "Done" agent = Agent( functions=[greet] ) client.run( agent=agent, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Usa greet() por favor."}], context_variables={"user_name": "John"} )
Agent
function call has an error (missing function, wrong argument, error) an error response will be appended to the chat so the Agent
can recover gracefully.Agent
, they will be executed in that order.An Agent
can hand off to another Agent
by returning it in a function
.
sales_agent = Agent(name="Sales Agent") def transfer_to_sales(): return sales_agent agent = Agent(functions=[transfer_to_sales]) response = client.run(agent, [{"role":"user", "content":"Transfer me to sales."}]) print(response.agent.name)
It can also update the context_variables
by returning a more complete Result
object. This can also contain a value
and an agent
, in case you want a single function to return a value, update the agent, and update the context variables (or any subset of the three).
sales_agent = Agent(name="Sales Agent") def talk_to_sales(): print("Hello, World!") return Result( value="Done", agent=sales_agent, context_variables={"department": "sales"} ) agent = Agent(functions=[talk_to_sales]) response = client.run( agent=agent, messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Transfer me to sales"}], context_variables={"user_name": "John"} ) print(response.agent.name) print(response.context_variables)
Sales Agent
{'department': 'sales', 'user_name': 'John'}
Note
If an Agent
calls multiple functions to hand-off to an Agent
, only the last handoff function will be used.
Swarm automatically converts functions into a JSON Schema that is passed into Chat Completions tools
.
description
.required
.type
(and default to string
).def greet(name, age: int, location: str = "New York"): """Greets the user. Make sure to get their name and age before calling. Args: name: Name of the user. age: Age of the user. location: Best place on earth. """ print(f"Hello {name}, glad you are {age} in {location}!")
{ "type": "function", "function": { "name": "greet", "description": "Greets the user. Make sure to get their name and age before calling.\n\nArgs:\n name: Name of the user.\n age: Age of the user.\n location: Best place on earth.", "parameters": { "type": "object", "properties": { "name": {"type": "string"}, "age": {"type": "integer"}, "location": {"type": "string"} }, "required": ["name", "age"] } } }
stream = client.run(agent, messages, stream=True) for chunk in stream: print(chunk)
Uses the same events as Chat Completions API streaming. See process_and_print_streaming_response
in /swarm/repl/repl.py
as an example.
Two new event types have been added:
{"delim":"start"}
and {"delim":"end"}
, to signal each time an Agent
handles a single message (response or function call). This helps identify switches between Agent
s.{"response": Response}
will return a Response
object at the end of a stream with the aggregated (complete) response, for convenience.Evaluations are crucial to any project, and we encourage developers to bring their own eval suites to test the performance of their swarms. For reference, we have some examples for how to eval swarm in the airline
, weather_agent
and triage_agent
quickstart examples. See the READMEs for more details.
Use the run_demo_loop
to test out your swarm! This will run a REPL on your command line. Supports streaming.
from swarm.repl import run_demo_loop ... run_demo_loop(agent, stream=True)
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