OpenAI ships Swarm 2 with built-in handoff tracing and per-agent budgets
Swarm 2 introduces a structured handoff log, hard token budgets per agent, and an interoperability shim for LangGraph and CrewAI.
OpenAI released Swarm 2, a refresh of its lightweight multi-agent runtime that adds structured handoff traces, hard token budgets per agent, and a compatibility shim for graphs authored in LangGraph or CrewAI.
The headline change is observability: every agent-to-agent handoff now emits a typed event with a parent-child trace ID, making it possible to reconstruct the exact decision chain that produced a final answer. Per-agent budgets terminate runs cleanly when a sub-agent burns its allocation, instead of cascading into the parent’s context.
What changed. Native handoff tracing, hard budgets, and a compatibility import for LangGraph and CrewAI graphs. Same Apache 2.0 license.
Why it matters. Handoff debuggability is the single biggest tax on multi-agent deployments. A standard trace format pulls cost out of the in-house tooling backlog.
Builder takeaway. If you have not picked an orchestrator, this is a credible default for Python teams. If you already use LangGraph, the shim lets you experiment without rewriting.