Open Responses: What you need to know

Open Responses is an open inference standard developed by OpenAI and the open-source AI community, with support from the Hugging Face ecosystem, to address the limitations of current inference formats like Chat Completion. It aims to facilitate the shift towards autonomous systems by providing a consistent format for generating text, images, and JSON outputs, as well as executing tool calls autonomously through agentic loops. Open Responses extends the existing Responses API by offering features such as stateless and encrypted reasoning, standardized model parameters, and the ability to handle raw reasoning streams. It distinguishes between Model Providers, who offer inference services, and Routers, who manage requests across providers. This new standard supports both internal and external tools, enabling complex workflows within a single request. Open Responses is designed to improve the inference experience by standardizing previously undocumented features of legacy APIs and is available for early access on Hugging Face Spaces.