Open Responses: What you need to know

Open Responses is a new and open inference standard. Initiated by OpenAI, built by the open source AI community, and backed by the Hugging Face ecosystem, Open Responses is based on the Responses API and is designed for the future of Agents. In this blog post, we’ll look at how Open Responses works and why the open source community should use Open Responses.

The era of the chatbot is long gone, and agents dominate inference workloads. Developers are shifting toward autonomous systems that reason, plan, and act over long-time horizons. Despite this shift, much of the ecosystem still uses the Chat Completion format, which was designed for turn-based conversations and falls short for agentic use cases. The Responses format was designed to address these limitations, but it is closed and not as widely adopted. The Chat Completion format is still the de facto standard despite the alternatives.

This mismatch between the agentic workflow requirements and entrenched interfaces motivates the need for an open inference standard. Over the coming months, we will collaborate with the community and inference providers to implement and adapt Open Responses to a shared format, practically capable of replacing chat completions.

Open Responses builds on the direction OpenAI has set with their Responses API launched in March 2025, which superseded the existing Completion and Assistants APIs with a consistent way to:

• Generate Text, Images, and JSON structured outputs
• Create Video content through a separate task-based endpoint
• Run agentic loops on the provider side, executing tool calls autonomously and returning the final result.

What is Open Responses?

Open Responses extends and open-sources the Responses API, making it more accessible for builders and routing providers to interoperate and collaborate on shared interests.

Some of the key points are: