OpenAI Productizes the Codex Harness as a Billable Session API
OpenAI launched the Agents API public beta with hosted orchestration, long-running sessions, compaction and hosted or BYO sandboxes. Standard token, tool and container charges apply without an extra API fee. Current documentation says zero data retention is unsupported.
Correction / update, October 14, 2026: Privacy and residency details are attributed to documentation inspected October 14; removed an unsupported SDK launch-month comparison.
OpenAI is productizing the Codex harness as a billable session API. The current documentation does not offer zero data retention.
OpenAI (September 10) published “Introducing the Agents API.” Public beta: client.beta.agents.sessions.create. OpenAI runs orchestration, long-running sessions, context compaction, recovery. Hosted sandboxes or BYO (Blaxel, Cloudflare, Daytona, DigitalOcean, E2B, Modal, Oracle, Runloop, Vercel). Multi-agent max_concurrent_subagents. No extra API fee — tokens + tools + container rates. The documentation inspected October 14 specifies US-only data residency and no ZDR, even with self-hosted sandboxes. Default model examples use gpt-6-astra.
Limits#
- ZDR still missing.
- A self-hosted sandbox does not remove the API’s session-retention requirements.