How to integrate Openai MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK

This guide walks you through connecting Openai to the OpenAI Agents SDK using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working Openai agent that can list all available openai models, upload a file for fine-tuning, create a new assistant with gpt-4 through natural language commands. This guide will help you understand how to give your OpenAI Agents SDK agent real control over a Openai account through Composio's Openai MCP server. Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

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Openai is a powerful AI platform offering advanced language, vision, and multimodal APIs. It's your gateway to building, managing, and scaling intelligent assistants and workflows.

126 Tools

Introduction

This guide walks you through connecting Openai to the OpenAI Agents SDK using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working Openai agent that can list all available openai models, upload a file for fine-tuning, create a new assistant with gpt-4 through natural language commands.

This guide will help you understand how to give your OpenAI Agents SDK agent real control over a Openai account through Composio's Openai MCP server.

Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

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TL;DR

Here's what you'll learn:
  • Get and set up your OpenAI and Composio API keys
  • Install the necessary dependencies
  • Initialize Composio and create a Tool Router session for Openai
  • Configure an AI agent that can use Openai as a tool
  • Run a live chat session where you can ask the agent to perform Openai operations

What is OpenAI Agents SDK?

The OpenAI Agents SDK is a lightweight framework for building AI agents that can use tools and maintain conversation state. It provides a simple interface for creating agents with hosted MCP tool support.

Key features include:

  • Hosted MCP Tools: Connect to external services through hosted MCP endpoints
  • SQLite Sessions: Persist conversation history across interactions
  • Simple API: Clean interface with Agent, Runner, and tool configuration
  • Streaming Support: Real-time response streaming for interactive applications

What is the Openai MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Openai MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your OpenAI account. It provides structured and secure access to your models, assistants, files, threads, and fine-tuning jobs, so your agent can perform actions like managing assistants, handling conversations, uploading or organizing files, and working with OpenAI models on your behalf.

  • Assistant and conversation management: Quickly create, update, or delete OpenAI assistants and manage threads or messages for seamless conversational flows.
  • File uploads and organization: Let your agent upload new files, list all uploaded documents, or delete unnecessary files to keep your workspace tidy.
  • Model discovery and utilization: Effortlessly list all available OpenAI models—including vision and multimodal—and retrieve their details to choose the best fit for your tasks.
  • Fine-tuning job insights: View a complete list of your organization's fine-tune jobs and track their progress or review results as needed.
  • Thread and run management: Create, modify, or inspect threads and run steps to fully control and monitor interactive agent conversations.

What is the Composio tool router, and how does it fit here?

What is Composio SDK?

Composio's Composio SDK helps agents find the right tools for a task at runtime. You can plug in multiple toolkits (like Gmail, HubSpot, and GitHub), and the agent will identify the relevant app and action to complete multi-step workflows. This can reduce token usage and improve the reliability of tool calls. Read more here: Getting started with Composio SDK

The tool router generates a secure MCP URL that your agents can access to perform actions.

How the Composio SDK works

The Composio SDK follows a three-phase workflow:

  1. Discovery: Searches for tools matching your task and returns relevant toolkits with their details.
  2. Authentication: Checks for active connections. If missing, creates an auth config and returns a connection URL via Auth Link.
  3. Execution: Executes the action using the authenticated connection.

Step-by-step Guide

Step by step09 STEPS
1

Prerequisites

Before starting, make sure you have:
  • Composio API Key and OpenAI API Key
  • Primary know-how of OpenAI Agents SDK
  • A live Openai project
  • Some knowledge of Python or Typescript
2

Getting API Keys for OpenAI and Composio

OpenAI API Key
  • Go to the OpenAI dashboard and create an API key. You'll need credits to use the models, or you can connect to another model provider.
  • Keep the API key safe.
Composio API Key
3

Install dependencies

npm install @composio/openai-agents @openai/agents dotenv

Install the Composio SDK and the OpenAI Agents SDK.

4

Set up environment variables

bash
OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...your-api-key
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your-api-key
USER_ID=composio_user@gmail.com

Create a .env file and add your OpenAI and Composio API keys.

5

Import dependencies

import 'dotenv/config';
import { Composio } from '@composio/core';
import { OpenAIAgentsProvider } from '@composio/openai-agents';
import { Agent, hostedMcpTool, run, OpenAIConversationsSession } from '@openai/agents';
import * as readline from 'readline';
What's happening:
  • You're importing all necessary libraries.
  • The Composio and OpenAIAgentsProvider classes are imported to connect your OpenAI agent to Composio tools like Openai.
6

Set up the Composio instance

dotenv.config();

const composioApiKey = process.env.COMPOSIO_API_KEY;
const userId = process.env.USER_ID;

if (!composioApiKey) {
  throw new Error('COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key');
}
if (!userId) {
  throw new Error('USER_ID is not set');
}

// Initialize Composio
const composio = new Composio({
  apiKey: composioApiKey,
  provider: new OpenAIAgentsProvider(),
});
What's happening:
  • dotenv.config() loads your .env file so COMPOSIO_API_KEY and USER_ID are available as environment variables.
  • Creating a Composio instance using the API Key and OpenAIAgentsProvider class.
7

Create a Tool Router session

// Create Tool Router session for Openai
const session = await composio.create(userId as string, {
  toolkits: ['openai'],
});
const mcpUrl = session.mcp.url;

What is happening:

  • You give the Tool Router the user id and the toolkits you want available. Here, it is only openai.
  • The router checks the user's Openai connection and prepares the MCP endpoint.
  • The returned session.mcp.url is the MCP URL that your agent will use to access Openai.
  • This approach keeps things lightweight and lets the agent request Openai tools only when needed during the conversation.
8

Configure the agent

// Configure agent with MCP tool
const agent = new Agent({
  name: 'Assistant',
  model: 'gpt-5',
  instructions:
    'You are a helpful assistant that can access Openai. Help users perform Openai operations through natural language.',
  tools: [
    hostedMcpTool({
      serverLabel: 'tool_router',
      serverUrl: mcpUrl,
      headers: { 'x-api-key': composioApiKey },
      requireApproval: 'never',
    }),
  ],
});
What's happening:
  • We're creating an Agent instance with a name, model (gpt-5), and clear instructions about its purpose.
  • The agent's instructions tell it that it can access Openai and help with queries, inserts, updates, authentication, and fetching database information.
  • The tools array includes a hostedMcpTool that connects to the MCP server URL we created earlier.
  • The headers object includes the Composio API key for secure authentication with the MCP server.
  • requireApproval: 'never' means the agent can execute Openai operations without asking for permission each time, making interactions smoother.
9

Start chat loop and handle conversation

// Keep conversation state across turns
const conversationSession = new OpenAIConversationsSession();

// Simple CLI
const rl = readline.createInterface({
  input: process.stdin,
  output: process.stdout,
  prompt: 'You: ',
});

console.log('\nComposio Tool Router session created.');
console.log('\nChat started. Type your requests below.');
console.log("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n");

try {
  const first = await run(agent, 'What can you help me with?', { session: conversationSession });
  console.log(`Assistant: ${first.finalOutput}\n`);
} catch (e) {
  console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
}

rl.prompt();

rl.on('line', async (userInput) => {
  const text = userInput.trim();

  if (['exit', 'quit', 'q'].includes(text.toLowerCase())) {
    console.log('Goodbye!');
    rl.close();
    process.exit(0);
  }

  if (!text) {
    rl.prompt();
    return;
  }

  try {
    const result = await run(agent, text, { session: conversationSession });
    console.log(`\nAssistant: ${result.finalOutput}\n`);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
  }

  rl.prompt();
});

rl.on('close', () => {
  console.log('\n👋 Session ended.');
  process.exit(0);
});
What's happening:
  • The program prints a session URL that you visit to authorize Openai.
  • After authorization, the chat begins.
  • Each message you type is processed by the agent using run().
  • The responses are printed to the console.
  • Typing exit, quit, or q cleanly ends the chat.

Complete Code

Here's the complete code to get you started with Openai and OpenAI Agents SDK:

import 'dotenv/config';
import { Composio } from '@composio/core';
import { OpenAIAgentsProvider } from '@composio/openai-agents';
import { Agent, hostedMcpTool, run, OpenAIConversationsSession } from '@openai/agents';
import * as readline from 'readline';

const composioApiKey = process.env.COMPOSIO_API_KEY;
const userId = process.env.USER_ID;

if (!composioApiKey) {
  throw new Error('COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set. Create a .env file with COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_key');
}
if (!userId) {
  throw new Error('USER_ID is not set');
}

// Initialize Composio
const composio = new Composio({
  apiKey: composioApiKey,
  provider: new OpenAIAgentsProvider(),
});

async function main() {
  // Create Tool Router session
  const session = await composio.create(userId as string, {
    toolkits: ['openai'],
  });
  const mcpUrl = session.mcp.url;

  // Configure agent with MCP tool
  const agent = new Agent({
    name: 'Assistant',
    model: 'gpt-5',
    instructions:
      'You are a helpful assistant that can access Openai. Help users perform Openai operations through natural language.',
    tools: [
      hostedMcpTool({
        serverLabel: 'tool_router',
        serverUrl: mcpUrl,
        headers: { 'x-api-key': composioApiKey },
        requireApproval: 'never',
      }),
    ],
  });

  // Keep conversation state across turns
  const conversationSession = new OpenAIConversationsSession();

  // Simple CLI
  const rl = readline.createInterface({
    input: process.stdin,
    output: process.stdout,
    prompt: 'You: ',
  });

  console.log('\nComposio Tool Router session created.');
  console.log('\nChat started. Type your requests below.');
  console.log("Commands: 'exit', 'quit', or 'q' to end\n");

  try {
    const first = await run(agent, 'What can you help me with?', { session: conversationSession });
    console.log(`Assistant: ${first.finalOutput}\n`);
  } catch (e) {
    console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
  }

  rl.prompt();

  rl.on('line', async (userInput) => {
    const text = userInput.trim();

    if (['exit', 'quit', 'q'].includes(text.toLowerCase())) {
      console.log('Goodbye!');
      rl.close();
      process.exit(0);
    }

    if (!text) {
      rl.prompt();
      return;
    }

    try {
      const result = await run(agent, text, { session: conversationSession });
      console.log(`\nAssistant: ${result.finalOutput}\n`);
    } catch (e) {
      console.error('Error:', e instanceof Error ? e.message : e, '\n');
    }

    rl.prompt();
  });

  rl.on('close', () => {
    console.log('\nSession ended.');
    process.exit(0);
  });
}

main().catch((err) => {
  console.error('Fatal error:', err);
  process.exit(1);
});

Conclusion

This was a starter code for integrating Openai MCP with OpenAI Agents SDK to build a functional AI agent that can interact with Openai.

Key features:

  • Hosted MCP tool integration through Composio's Tool Router
  • SQLite session persistence for conversation history
  • Simple async chat loop for interactive testing
You can extend this by adding more toolkits, implementing custom business logic, or building a web interface around the agent.
TOOLS

Supported Tools

Every Openai action and event your agent gets out of the box.

Add Upload Part

Tool to add a part (chunk of bytes) to an Upload object.

Cancel batch

Tool to cancel an in-progress batch.

Cancel evaluation run

Tool to cancel an ongoing evaluation run.

Cancel Response

Tool to cancel a background model response by its ID.

Cancel Run

Tool to cancel a run that is currently in progress.

Cancel upload

Tool to cancel an upload.

Compact Response

Tool to compact a conversation or response to reduce token usage.

Create Audio Transcription

Tool to transcribe audio files to text via OpenAI Audio Transcriptions API.

Create Audio Translation

Tool to translate audio files to English text via OpenAI Audio Translations API.

Create Batch

Tool to create and execute a batch from an uploaded file of requests.

Create Chat Completion

Tool to create a chat completion response from OpenAI models.

Create Completion (Legacy)

Tool to generate text completions using OpenAI's legacy Completions API.

Create Container

Tool to create a new container with configurable memory, expiration, file access, and network policies.

Create Container File

Tool to create a file in a container.

Create Conversation

Tool to create a new conversation for multi-turn interactions.

Create Conversation Items

Tool to create items in a conversation with the given ID.

Create Embeddings

Tool to generate text embeddings via the OpenAI embeddings endpoint.

Create Eval

Tool to create an evaluation structure for testing a model's performance.

Create Evaluation Run

Tool to create a new evaluation run for testing model configurations.

Create fine-tuning job

Tool to create a fine-tuning job which begins the process of creating a new model from a given dataset.

Generate Image

Tool to generate an image via the OpenAI Images API and return hosted image asset URL and metadata.

Edit Image

Tool to create edited or extended images via OpenAI Images Edit API.

Create Image Variation

Tool to create a variation of a given image using the OpenAI Images API.

Create Message

Tool to create a new message in a specific thread.

Create Moderation

Tool to classify text and/or image inputs for potentially harmful content via the OpenAI Moderation API.

Create Realtime Call

Tool to create a Realtime API call over WebRTC and receive the SDP answer needed to complete the peer connection.

Create Realtime Client Secret

Tool to create an ephemeral client secret for authenticating Realtime API connections.

Create Realtime Session

Tool to create an ephemeral API token for client-side Realtime API applications.

Create Realtime Transcription Session

Tool to create an ephemeral API token for realtime transcriptions via the Realtime API.

Create Response

Tool to generate a one-shot model response via the Responses API.

Create Run

Tool to create a run on a thread with an assistant.

Create Skill

Tool to create a skill from uploaded files.

Create Speech (TTS)

Tool to generate text-to-speech audio using OpenAI's Audio API.

Create Thread

Tool to create a new thread.

Create Thread And Run

Tool to create a thread and run it in one request.

Create Upload

Tool to create an intermediate Upload object for large file uploads.

Create Vector Store

Tool to create a new vector store.

Create Vector Store File

Tool to create a vector store file by attaching a File to a vector store.

Create vector store file batch

Tool to create a vector store file batch.

Create Video

Tool to create a video using Sora models via the OpenAI Videos API.

Create Video Remix

Tool to create a video remix from an existing generated video using OpenAI's Video API.

Delete assistant

Tool to delete a specific assistant by its ID.

Delete chat completion

Tool to delete a stored chat completion by its ID.

Delete container

Tool to delete a specific container by its ID.

Delete container file

Tool to delete a file from a container.

Delete conversation

Tool to delete a conversation by its ID.

Delete conversation item

Tool to delete an item from a conversation with the given IDs.

Delete evaluation

Tool to delete a specific evaluation by its ID.

Delete evaluation run

Tool to delete an evaluation run.

Delete file

Tool to delete a file by its ID after confirming the target.

Delete message

Tool to delete a message from a thread.

Delete response

Tool to delete a model response with the given ID.

Delete skill

Tool to delete a specific skill by its ID.

Delete thread

Tool to delete a thread by its ID.

Delete Vector Store

Tool to delete a vector store.

Delete Vector Store File

Tool to delete a vector store file.

Delete video

Tool to delete a video by its ID.

Download file

Tool to download the contents of a specified file by its ID.

Download Video Content

Tool to download video content (MP4) or preview assets from OpenAI Videos API.

Get Chat Completion

Tool to retrieve a stored chat completion.

Get Chat Completion Messages

Tool to retrieve messages from a stored chat completion.

Get ChatKit thread

Tool to retrieve a ChatKit thread by its ID.

Get Conversation Item

Tool to retrieve a single item from a conversation.

Get Eval

Tool to retrieve an evaluation by ID.

Get Evaluation Run

Tool to retrieve an evaluation run by ID to check status and results.

Get Eval Run Output Item

Tool to retrieve a specific output item from an evaluation run by its ID.

Get eval run output items

Tool to get a list of output items for an evaluation run.

Get Evaluation Runs

Tool to get a paginated list of runs for an evaluation.

Get Input Token Counts

Tool to calculate input token counts for OpenAI API requests.

Get Message

Tool to retrieve a specific message from a thread by its ID.

Get Response

Tool to retrieve a model response by ID.

Get Run Step

Tool to retrieve a specific run step from an Assistants API run to inspect detailed execution progress, view tool calls, or check message creation.

Get Vector Store

Tool to retrieve a vector store by its ID.

Get Vector Store File

Tool to retrieve a file from a vector store.

Get Vector Store File Batch

Tool to retrieve a vector store file batch.

Get Video

Tool to retrieve a video generation job by its unique identifier.

List Assistants

Tool to list assistants to discover the correct assistant_id by name or metadata.

List Batches

Tool to list your organization's batches.

List Chat Completions

Tool to list stored chat completions that were created with the `store` parameter set to true.

List ChatKit thread items

Tool to list ChatKit thread items.

List container files

Tool to list files in a container.

List Containers

Tool to list containers.

List Conversation Items

Tool to list all items for a conversation with the given ID.

List engines

Tool to list available engines and their basic information.

List Evals

Tool to list evaluations for a project.

List files

Tool to retrieve a list of files uploaded to your organization/project context.

List Files in Vector Store Batch

Tool to list vector store files in a batch.

List fine-tunes

Tool to list your organization's fine-tuning jobs.

List fine-tuning job events

Tool to get status updates for a fine-tuning job.

List fine-tuning job checkpoints

Tool to list checkpoints for a fine-tuning job.

List Input Items

Tool to retrieve input items for a given response from the OpenAI Responses API.

List Messages

Tool to list messages in an Assistants thread to fetch the assistant's generated outputs after a run completes.

List models

Tool to list available models scoped to the current account/organization — some public models may be absent due to permissions.

List Runs

Tool to list runs belonging to a thread.

List Run Steps

Tool to list run steps for an Assistants API run to track detailed execution progress, inspect tool calls, and view message creation events.

List Skills

Tool to list skills.

List ChatKit Threads

Tool to list ChatKit threads with pagination and filtering.

List Vector Store Files

Tool to list files in a vector store.

List Vector Stores

Tool to list vector stores to discover available vector stores by name or metadata.

List Videos

Tool to list all video generation jobs.

Modify Assistant

Tool to modify an existing assistant.

Modify Message

Tool to modify an existing message's metadata in a thread.

Modify Run

Tool to modify a run's metadata.

Modify thread

Tool to modify an existing thread's metadata.

Modify Vector Store

Tool to modify an existing vector store.

Retrieve assistant

Tool to retrieve details of a specific assistant.

Retrieve Batch

Tool to retrieve a batch by ID to check its status, progress, and results.

Retrieve container

Tool to retrieve details of a specific container by its ID.

Retrieve container file

Tool to retrieve metadata for a specific file in a container.

Retrieve container file content

Tool to retrieve the content of a file within a container.

Retrieve engine

Tool to retrieve details of a specific engine.

Retrieve file

Tool to retrieve information about a specific file.

Retrieve fine-tuning job

Tool to retrieve information about a fine-tuning job.

Retrieve model

Tool to retrieve details of a specific model, confirming its metadata (ownership, created date) and verifying access under your org — a model appearing in OPENAI_LIST_MODELS does not guarantee access.

Retrieve run

Tool to retrieve an Assistants run by ID to check status, errors, and usage.

Retrieve thread

Tool to retrieve metadata of a specific thread by its ID — does not include message bodies or assistant replies (those require a completed run and separate message listing).

Retrieve Vector Store File Content

Tool to retrieve the parsed contents of a vector store file.

Run grader

Tool to run a grader to evaluate model performance on a given sample.

Search Vector Store

Tool to search a vector store for relevant chunks based on a query and file attributes filter.

Submit Tool Outputs to Run

Tool to submit tool call outputs to continue a run that requires action.

Update Chat Completion

Tool to update metadata for a stored chat completion.

Update Conversation

Tool to update a conversation's metadata.

Update Eval

Tool to update certain properties of an evaluation (name and metadata).

Update Vector Store File Attributes

Tool to update custom attributes on a vector store file.

Upload file

Tool to upload a file for use across OpenAI endpoints.

Validate grader configuration

Tool to validate a grader configuration for fine-tuning jobs.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

With a standalone Openai MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Openai tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Openai and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Yes, you can. OpenAI Agents SDK fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Openai tools.

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Openai scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Openai data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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