Sunday, July 06, 2025

OpenAI API: Responses vs. Chat Completions

Responses vs. Chat Completions - OpenAI API

The Responses API and Chat Completions API are two different ways to interact with OpenAI's models.

The Chat Completions API is an "industry standard" for building AI applications
(some other LLM APIs provide same or similar API)

The Responses API is our newest core API and an agentic API primitive, combining the simplicity of Chat Completions with the ability to do more agentic tasks. As model capabilities evolve, the Responses API is a flexible foundation for building action-oriented applications, with built-in tools:

Events are simpler with the Responses API. It has a predictable, event-driven architecture, whereas the Chat Completions API continuously appends to the content field as tokens are generated—requiring you to manually track differences between each state. Multi-step conversational logic and reasoning are easier to implement with the Responses API.

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