AI · 5 min read · April 23, 2026
OpenHands SDK enables composable, secure software development agents
A redesigned toolkit for building production agents with sandboxed execution, multi-model routing, and human-facing interfaces.
Source: arxiv/cs.AI · Xingyao Wang, Simon Rosenberg, Juan Michelini, Calvin Smith, Hoang Tran, Engel Nyst, Rohit Malhotra, Xuhui Zhou, Valerie Chen, Robert Brennan, Graham Neubig · open original ↗ ↗
OpenHands SDK provides a flexible, extensible foundation for building and deploying production-grade software engineering agents with native sandboxing and multi-LLM support.
- — Simple default interface requires minimal code; scales to complex agents with custom tools and memory.
- — Integrates sandboxed execution, REST/WebSocket services, and local-to-remote portability natively.
- — Supports multiple interaction modes: VSCode, VNC, browser, CLI, and API endpoints.
- — Model-agnostic routing allows agents to switch between OpenAI, Claude, Google, and other LLMs.
- — Built-in security analysis and lifecycle control reduce deployment risk and system failures.
- — V1 architecture cuts system-attributable failures versus V0 with minimal event-sourcing overhead.
- — Outperforms existing OpenAI, Claude, and Google SDKs in integration breadth and control.
Frequently asked
- OpenHands uniquely combines native sandboxed execution, model-agnostic multi-LLM routing, integrated lifecycle control, and built-in security analysis. Competing SDKs from OpenAI and Claude are tightly coupled to their own models and lack native sandboxing. OpenHands allows you to swap LLM providers and run agents in isolated environments without external dependencies.