Member-only story
OpenAI’s Agent Tools Drop: Another Billion-Dollar Bet on an AI Future That’s Already Slipping Away
By the time Silicon Valley finishes its press cycle, the revolution is already over. Or is it?
This week, OpenAI unveiled its much-hyped Agent Tools — a suite of developer APIs and SDKs designed to build the autonomous AI agents of tomorrow. CEO Sam Altman declared, yet again, that 2025 will be the “year of the AI agent.” It’s a slick, well-rehearsed pitch: give developers shiny new toys, charge enterprises for the privilege, and promise autonomy at industrial scale.
But here’s the uncomfortable question: Is OpenAI leading the charge, or playing catch-up?
The Responses API: Selling Yesterday’s Breakthroughs
At its core, OpenAI’s Responses API is an evolution of its Operator and deep research agents — tools that perform web searches, file scanning, and light computer automation. Enterprises can now customize these components, while developers get finer control.
OpenAI boasts that its GPT-4o search model can answer fact-based questions with 90% accuracy, surpassing even GPT-4.5. However, challenges remain. The company itself concedes its Computer-Using Agent (CUA) is “not yet highly reliable,” prone to inadvertent mistakes. Hallucinations and…
