OpenAI Enhances API Responses with Remote MCP Servers and New Developer Tools

OpenAI has unveiled a range of new features for its API Responses, aimed at developers and companies building AI applications with GPT-4o and the o-models family.

API Responses serves as OpenAI’s primary interface for creating “agent” applications—systems able to independently carry out tasks by invoking tools, retrieving information, or interacting with external services.

The core of this update is the support for remote MCP servers. The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard introduced by Anthropic, which governs access to external tools and data sources, and is increasingly adopted by companies in the AI sector. With this update, developers can now connect any server that is MCP-compatible, including services like Stripe, Twilio, Shopify, PayPal, and Intercom.

Several new tools are now integrated directly into the API Responses. This includes the gpt-image-1 model, which facilitates image generation for both ChatGPT and Sora. Additionally, there is now a code interpreter from ChatGPT, enabling complex calculations, data analysis, and image processing. File search capabilities have also been enhanced with support for attribute-based filters and searching across multiple vector stores.

For agent developers, OpenAI has introduced new features focused on reliability, privacy, and user-friendliness. A new background mode allows for the asynchronous processing of long tasks, eliminating the need to keep connections open. The API also provides automatic “reasoning summaries” to simplify understanding of the model’s logic. For clients who have zero-data retention agreements, OpenAI now allows the transfer of encrypted reasoning data between API requests without storing it on servers.

These new features are now available through API Responses. Pricing remains largely unchanged, with the use of remote MCP servers incurring no additional costs, and users only paying for generated tokens.

[Source](https://the-decoder.com/openai-has-upgraded-the-responses-api-with-remote-mcp-servers-and-new-tools/)