OpenAI Agents SDK
openai/openai-agents-python
A lightweight, production-ready multi-agent SDK with tracing.
The successor to the Swarm experiments: a primitives-based SDK (agents, handoffs, guardrails, sessions) with built-in tracing and MCP support. OpenAI's main contribution to the orchestration layer.
In the news
Best of Agent Harnesses tracks 167 harnesses — and their graveyard
The Best of Agent Harnesses list ranks 167 agent harnesses weekly by capability, autonomy and recovery, ships an MCP server so agents can pick their own harness, and maintains a graveyard that flagged a 268k-star repo for suspected star manipulation. Curation itself becomes harness infrastructure.
Anthropic moves MCP toward open foundation governance
Anthropic announces plans to donate MCP to a neutral foundation, with new registry, auth and sandbox specs — cementing MCP as vendor-neutral infrastructure for the entire agent ecosystem.
Anthropic launches the Claude Agent SDK
Anthropic open-sources the SDK behind Claude Code — the agent loop, tool use, subagents, memory and hooks — letting developers build their own Claude-powered agents on production rails.
OpenAI ships the Agents SDK and upgraded Responses API
OpenAI releases an open-source Agents SDK (successor to the Swarm experiments) with handoffs, guardrails and tracing, plus a Responses API purpose-built for agentic workflows.
Related projects
OpenClaw
openclaw/openclaw
The viral open-source personal AI assistant that really does things.
OpenClaw (born as Clawdbot in late 2025) is a self-hosted personal agent that connects your chats, email, browser and terminal into one always-on assistant. Its explosive growth — hundreds of thousands of stars within months — made 'personal agent harness' a mainstream category.
DeepSeek Harness
deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness
Everything is a Plugin — DeepSeek's open agent harness.
DeepSeek Harness is the breakout open-source harness of 2026: an architecture where everything — tools, subagents, even the loop itself — is a plugin. A Desktop app for macOS and Windows followed in October 2026, and the project passed 240k stars in under three months.
AutoGPT
Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT
The 2023 experiment that started the autonomous agent wave.
AutoGPT gave GPT-4 a loop, a memory and tools and let it run — kicking off the entire autonomous-agent category. Now rebuilt as a platform for building, deploying and continuously improving agents.