OpenAI-Compatible API — AI Glossary

Reference details

Related terms

• Chat Completion
• Model Routing
• AI Gateway

Example: Portable until it is not

Switching provider is base_url and model string. What does not travel is everything at the edges: tool-calling dialects, structured-output support, reasoning parameters, token accounting and error semantics. The core path ports cleanly; the features you actually rely on are where portability quietly stops.

Commonly confused with

Compatible is not equivalent. The label describes the request and response envelope, not behaviour. Two compatible endpoints can differ in tokenisation, default sampling, rate-limit semantics and which optional fields they honour — none of which the shared schema constrains.

When to use it

Reach for it when:

• You want to keep provider substitution cheap
• Evaluating several models against the same client code
• Local and hosted inference should share one code path

Reach for something else when:

• Assuming identical output across providers on the same input
• Relying on an optional field without checking each provider honours it
• You need a provider-specific capability, where the abstraction costs more than it saves

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