file_search (OpenAI)
Tool : A precise action the AI can call · requires openai-api
Search your documents indexed in an OpenAI vector store.
RAG without infrastructure, with your documents hosted at OpenAI.
Security reflects where data goes, requested permissions and incidents on record at the verification date. It is not a guarantee of zero risk: check the deployment mode and the connections you enable.
What it does, concretely
When a language model has no knowledge of your internal documents, it cannot answer questions about them. File search solves this by letting the model search through files you have previously uploaded to OpenAI's infrastructure, without requiring you to build your own retrieval system.
In practice, you upload your files via the OpenAI Files API, group them into a vector store, then enable the file_search tool in your Responses API calls. When the model determines that a search is useful, it runs it automatically using semantic and keyword search, retrieves the relevant passages, and incorporates them into its response.
This tool is aimed at developers who want to enrich an assistant or application with a document knowledge base, such as internal policies, product manuals, or reports, without deploying their own vector search infrastructure.
It is not suited to teams that need to keep their documents on their own infrastructure, nor to those looking for a no-code solution, as integration is exclusively through the API.
What it offers
- ·Semantic and keyword search across your indexed files, executed automatically by the model. (paid)
- ·Creation and management of vector stores to organise your document knowledge bases. (paid)
- ·File upload via the OpenAI Files API, from a local path or a remote URL. (paid)
- ·OpenAI-hosted tool: no client-side execution code is needed to handle results. (paid)
- ·Native integration with the OpenAI Responses API. (paid)
- ·Read-only access to uploaded documents, with no ability to modify source files. (paid)
In practice
- Price
- Paid · from 2 €
- Commercial use
- Commercial use: yes
- Available on
- api
- Host
- openai-api
- FR interface
- No
Security and data
- Rating
- Security: nothing to flag
- Capabilities
- readswritesexecutesnetwork
- Your data
- Data with the vendor
- Maintenance
- Active
Links and repository checked on 25 October 2026 · added on 1 November 2024
How to install file_search (OpenAI)
tools=[{"type":"file_search","vector_store_ids":[...]}]