OpenAI hosted tools
The benefit of using the SDK that is built by OpenAI is that it comes with easy access to a set of powerful and pre-built tools. These tools require minimal setup; they are fully managed and hosted on OpenAI’s servers (similar to how the LLM is also hosted on OpenAI’s servers). They are also constantly updated, which means you can leverage the latest and greatest technology when calling these tools.
Note
OpenAI-hosted tools incur token costs, just like model LLM calls. When a model calls one of these tools, the tool call and any data passed between the model and tool are billed as tokens.
Hosted tools are included as part of OpenAI’s Responses API framework. When you specify hosted tools via the Agents SDK, the model is aware of those tools and can call them as functions in the same way as custom Python functions. The hosted tools that are available are summarized in the following table: