Plan Your Automation Migration Before OpenAI Agent Builder and Evals Shut Down

Which features end, and when?

I picked out the three items in the deprecation table that relate to agent automation. All were announced on June 3, 2026.

The same table also shows the Assistants API was scheduled to shut down on August 26, 2026, with the Responses API and Conversations API given as replacements. That date has already passed, so first check whether any calls still depend on that API.

What inventory should you build before migrating?

The closer the shutdown date gets, the bigger the risk is simply not knowing where something is used. Start by finding out the following.

• Where workflows built in Agent Builder are called from (webhooks, schedules, internal tools)
• Where code or settings reference prompt object IDs
• The evaluation sets you ran in Evals and their pass criteria
• Who owns the tasks above, and the alert path if they fail

What should you check when looking at the Agents SDK as a replacement?

The OpenAI Agents SDK documentation introduces agents, handoffs, guardrails, sessions, human in the loop, and tracing as its basic building blocks. Guardrails are described as running input and output validation in parallel with agent execution so a run stops quickly on failure. If your automation needs an approval step, open the documentation yourself to see how far the human-in-the-loop approach is explained and how it handles pause and resume state. The details of the approval method do not appear on the documentation's first page alone.

How do you set recovery criteria for failures?

After the shutdown date you cannot go back to the earlier setup, so it is more realistic to split recovery criteria by date.

1. Export your evaluation records and baseline scores before October 31.
2. Compare results in the new environment with the same inputs, and hold off on switching if differences exceed your tolerance.
3. Run both environments in parallel for a while, and route write operations that affect the outside world through human approval in the new environment only.
4. After November 30, check that error alerts actually reach the person responsible.

Where do you recheck the dates and replacement paths?

The Deprecations page in the OpenAI API documentation is the reference. Recommended replacement paths can change after an announcement, and this article is current as of 2026-10-08. Reopen the relevant entry just before you migrate to confirm the dates and paths.