How to integrate Openai MCP with LangChain

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Introduction

This guide walks you through connecting Openai to LangChain using the Composio tool router. By the end, you'll have a working Openai agent that can list all available openai models, upload a file for fine-tuning, create a new assistant with gpt-4, get all messages from a conversation thread through natural language commands.

This guide will help you understand how to give your LangChain agent real control over a Openai account through Composio's Openai MCP server.

Before we dive in, let's take a quick look at the key ideas and tools involved.

TL;DR

Here's what you'll learn:
  • Get and set up your OpenAI and Composio API keys
  • Connect your Openai project to Composio
  • Create a Tool Router MCP session for Openai
  • Initialize an MCP client and retrieve Openai tools
  • Build a LangChain agent that can interact with Openai
  • Set up an interactive chat interface for testing

What is LangChain?

LangChain is a framework for developing applications powered by language models. It provides tools and abstractions for building agents that can reason, use tools, and maintain conversation context.

Key features include:

  • Agent Framework: Build agents that can use tools and make decisions
  • MCP Integration: Connect to external services through Model Context Protocol adapters
  • Memory Management: Maintain conversation history across interactions
  • Multi-Provider Support: Works with OpenAI, Anthropic, and other LLM providers

What is the Openai MCP server, and what's possible with it?

The Openai MCP server is an implementation of the Model Context Protocol that connects your AI agent and assistants like Claude, Cursor, etc directly to your OpenAI account. It provides structured and secure access to your models, assistants, files, threads, and fine-tuning jobs, so your agent can perform actions like managing assistants, handling conversations, uploading or organizing files, and working with OpenAI models on your behalf.

  • Assistant and conversation management: Quickly create, update, or delete OpenAI assistants and manage threads or messages for seamless conversational flows.
  • File uploads and organization: Let your agent upload new files, list all uploaded documents, or delete unnecessary files to keep your workspace tidy.
  • Model discovery and utilization: Effortlessly list all available OpenAI models—including vision and multimodal—and retrieve their details to choose the best fit for your tasks.
  • Fine-tuning job insights: View a complete list of your organization's fine-tune jobs and track their progress or review results as needed.
  • Thread and run management: Create, modify, or inspect threads and run steps to fully control and monitor interactive agent conversations.

Supported Tools & Triggers

Tools
Create AssistantTool to create a new assistant with specified parameters.
Create MessageTool to create a new message in a specific thread.
Create ThreadTool to create a new thread.
Delete assistantTool to delete a specific assistant by its id.
Delete fileTool to delete a file.
List filesTool to retrieve a list of files.
List fine-tunesTool to list your organization's fine-tuning jobs.
List modelsTool to list available models.
List run stepsTool to retrieve all steps of a specific run.
Modify threadTool to modify an existing thread's metadata.
Retrieve assistantTool to retrieve details of a specific assistant.
Retrieve modelTool to retrieve details of a specific model.
Retrieve threadTool to retrieve details of a specific thread by its id.
Upload fileTool to upload a file for use across openai endpoints.

What is the Composio tool router, and how does it fit here?

What is Tool Router?

Composio's Tool Router helps agents find the right tools for a task at runtime. You can plug in multiple toolkits (like Gmail, HubSpot, and GitHub), and the agent will identify the relevant app and action to complete multi-step workflows. This can reduce token usage and improve the reliability of tool calls. Read more here: Getting started with Tool Router

The tool router generates a secure MCP URL that your agents can access to perform actions.

How the Tool Router works

The Tool Router follows a three-phase workflow:

  1. Discovery: Searches for tools matching your task and returns relevant toolkits with their details.
  2. Authentication: Checks for active connections. If missing, creates an auth config and returns a connection URL via Auth Link.
  3. Execution: Executes the action using the authenticated connection.

Step-by-step Guide

Prerequisites

Before starting this tutorial, make sure you have:
  • Python 3.10 or higher installed on your system
  • A Composio account with an API key
  • An OpenAI API key
  • Basic familiarity with Python and async programming

Getting API Keys for OpenAI and Composio

OpenAI API Key
  • Go to the OpenAI dashboard and create an API key. You'll need credits to use the models, or you can connect to another model provider.
  • Keep the API key safe.
Composio API Key
  • Log in to the Composio dashboard.
  • Navigate to your API settings and generate a new API key.
  • Store this key securely as you'll need it for authentication.

Install dependencies

pip install composio-langchain langchain-mcp-adapters langchain python-dotenv

Install the required packages for LangChain with MCP support.

What's happening:

  • composio-langchain provides Composio integration for LangChain
  • langchain-mcp-adapters enables MCP client connections
  • langchain is the core agent framework
  • python-dotenv loads environment variables

Set up environment variables

bash
COMPOSIO_API_KEY=your_composio_api_key_here
COMPOSIO_USER_ID=your_composio_user_id_here
OPENAI_API_KEY=your_openai_api_key_here

Create a .env file in your project root.

What's happening:

  • COMPOSIO_API_KEY authenticates your requests to Composio's API
  • COMPOSIO_USER_ID identifies the user for session management
  • OPENAI_API_KEY enables access to OpenAI's language models

Import dependencies

from langchain_mcp_adapters.client import MultiServerMCPClient
from langchain.agents import create_agent
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from composio import Composio
import asyncio
import os

load_dotenv()
What's happening:
  • We're importing LangChain's MCP adapter and Composio SDK
  • The dotenv import loads environment variables from your .env file
  • This setup prepares the foundation for connecting LangChain with Openai functionality through MCP

Initialize Composio client

async def main():
    composio = Composio(api_key=os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY"))

    if not os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY"):
        raise ValueError("COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set")
    if not os.getenv("COMPOSIO_USER_ID"):
        raise ValueError("COMPOSIO_USER_ID is not set")
What's happening:
  • We're loading the COMPOSIO_API_KEY from environment variables and validating it exists
  • Creating a Composio instance that will manage our connection to Openai tools
  • Validating that COMPOSIO_USER_ID is also set before proceeding

Create a Tool Router session

# Create Tool Router session for Openai
session = composio.create(
    user_id=os.getenv("COMPOSIO_USER_ID"),
    toolkits=['openai']
)

url = session.mcp.url
What's happening:
  • We're creating a Tool Router session that gives your agent access to Openai tools
  • The create method takes the user ID and specifies which toolkits should be available
  • The returned session.mcp.url is the MCP server URL that your agent will use
  • This approach allows the agent to dynamically load and use Openai tools as needed

Configure the agent with the MCP URL

client = MultiServerMCPClient({
    "openai-agent": {
        "transport": "streamable_http",
        "url": session.mcp.url,
        "headers": {
            "x-api-key": os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY")
        }
    }
})

tools = await client.get_tools()

agent = create_agent("gpt-5", tools)
What's happening:
  • We're creating a MultiServerMCPClient that connects to our Openai MCP server via HTTP
  • The client is configured with a name and the URL from our Tool Router session
  • get_tools() retrieves all available Openai tools that the agent can use
  • We're creating a LangChain agent using the GPT-5 model

Set up interactive chat interface

conversation_history = []

print("Chat started! Type 'exit' or 'quit' to end the conversation.\n")
print("Ask any Openai related question or task to the agent.\n")

while True:
    user_input = input("You: ").strip()

    if user_input.lower() in ['exit', 'quit', 'bye']:
        print("\nGoodbye!")
        break

    if not user_input:
        continue

    conversation_history.append({"role": "user", "content": user_input})
    print("\nAgent is thinking...\n")

    response = await agent.ainvoke({"messages": conversation_history})
    conversation_history = response['messages']
    final_response = response['messages'][-1].content
    print(f"Agent: {final_response}\n")
What's happening:
  • We initialize an empty conversation_history list to maintain context across interactions
  • A while loop continuously accepts user input from the command line
  • When a user types a message, it's added to the conversation history and sent to the agent
  • The agent processes the request using the ainvoke() method with the full conversation history
  • Users can type 'exit', 'quit', or 'bye' to end the chat session gracefully

Run the application

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())
What's happening:
  • We call the main() function using asyncio.run() to start the application

Complete Code

Here's the complete code to get you started with Openai and LangChain:

from langchain_mcp_adapters.client import MultiServerMCPClient
from langchain.agents import create_agent
from dotenv import load_dotenv
from composio import Composio
import asyncio
import os

load_dotenv()

async def main():
    composio = Composio(api_key=os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY"))
    
    if not os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY"):
        raise ValueError("COMPOSIO_API_KEY is not set")
    if not os.getenv("COMPOSIO_USER_ID"):
        raise ValueError("COMPOSIO_USER_ID is not set")
    
    session = composio.create(
        user_id=os.getenv("COMPOSIO_USER_ID"),
        toolkits=['openai']
    )

    url = session.mcp.url
    
    client = MultiServerMCPClient({
        "openai-agent": {
            "transport": "streamable_http",
            "url": url,
            "headers": {
                "x-api-key": os.getenv("COMPOSIO_API_KEY")
            }
        }
    })
    
    tools = await client.get_tools()
  
    agent = create_agent("gpt-5", tools)
    
    conversation_history = []
    
    print("Chat started! Type 'exit' or 'quit' to end the conversation.\n")
    print("Ask any Openai related question or task to the agent.\n")
    
    while True:
        user_input = input("You: ").strip()
        
        if user_input.lower() in ['exit', 'quit', 'bye']:
            print("\nGoodbye!")
            break
        
        if not user_input:
            continue
        
        conversation_history.append({"role": "user", "content": user_input})
        print("\nAgent is thinking...\n")
        
        response = await agent.ainvoke({"messages": conversation_history})
        conversation_history = response['messages']
        final_response = response['messages'][-1].content
        print(f"Agent: {final_response}\n")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    asyncio.run(main())

Conclusion

You've successfully built a LangChain agent that can interact with Openai through Composio's Tool Router.

Key features of this implementation:

  • Dynamic tool loading through Composio's Tool Router
  • Conversation history maintenance for context-aware responses
  • Async Python provides clean, efficient execution of agent workflows
You can extend this further by adding error handling, implementing specific business logic, or integrating additional Composio toolkits to create multi-app workflows.

How to build Openai MCP Agent with another framework

FAQ

What are the differences in Tool Router MCP and Openai MCP?

With a standalone Openai MCP server, the agents and LLMs can only access a fixed set of Openai tools tied to that server. However, with the Composio Tool Router, agents can dynamically load tools from Openai and many other apps based on the task at hand, all through a single MCP endpoint.

Can I use Tool Router MCP with LangChain?

Yes, you can. LangChain fully supports MCP integration. You get structured tool calling, message history handling, and model orchestration while Tool Router takes care of discovering and serving the right Openai tools.

Can I manage the permissions and scopes for Openai while using Tool Router?

Yes, absolutely. You can configure which Openai scopes and actions are allowed when connecting your account to Composio. You can also bring your own OAuth credentials or API configuration so you keep full control over what the agent can do.

How safe is my data with Composio Tool Router?

All sensitive data such as tokens, keys, and configuration is fully encrypted at rest and in transit. Composio is SOC 2 Type 2 compliant and follows strict security practices so your Openai data and credentials are handled as safely as possible.

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