Microsoft Foundry Blog
Your source for learning and building with our models, agents, and tools.
Latest posts
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | May 2026
May ships trace-based evaluation for any agent on any cloud, Grok 4.3 and DeepSeek V4 in the model catalog, GPT-5 Reinforcement Fine-Tuning at gated GA, three Microsoft Research on-device agent models, Managed VNET at GA, project-level cost attribution, Content Understanding improvements reaching GA, Foundry Local 1.1 and 1.2 with live audio and vision, and azure-ai-projects 2.2.0 with skills, toolboxes, external agents, and model weight registry — plus a guide to Microsoft Foundry sessions at Microsoft Build.
How to run evals for the model router
Walk through running quality, cost, and latency evaluations for the Foundry model router using an open-source GitHub repo designed for router-aware eval pipelines.
Foundry Local 1.1: Live Transcription, Embeddings, and Responses API
Foundry Local 1.1 adds live transcription, embeddings, Responses API, WebGPU plugin, and download cancellation.
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | April 2026
April brings a wave of model arrivals — GPT-5.5, GPT-image-2, Microsoft first-party MAI models for image, voice, and transcription, Gemma 4, and Claude Opus 4.7 — alongside Foundry Local GA, Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0 GA, the Microsoft Foundry Toolkit for VS Code GA, batch evaluations for third-party agents, new tracing and monitoring capabilities, SDK updates across Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, .NET, and Java, and a reminder to register for Microsoft Build.
Introducing Toolboxes in Foundry
Available in Public Preview Today Toolbox is a new way to curate, configure, and reuse tools across all of your AI agents without rewiring them every time from Foundry. Today, teams build agents across different frameworks and runtimes. Each agent often wires tools directly, with its own authentication, credentials, and integration code. As organizations scale agent usage, this leads to duplicated work, inconsistent behavior, and fragile production deployments. Toolbox fixes this by letting you define a curated set of tools once, manage them centrally in Foundry, and expose them through a unified endpo...
From Local to Production: The Complete Developer Journey for Building, Composing, and Deploying AI Agents
When we launched Microsoft Agent Framework last October, we made a promise: building production-grade AI agents should feel as natural and structured as building any other software. Today, we’re delivering on that promise — with the v1.0 release of Microsoft Agent Framework and the general availability of Foundry Toolkit for Visual Studio Code (formerly AI Toolkit for VS Code), new capabilities in memory (preview) in Foundry Agent Service, Toolbox in Foundry (preview) to give your agents the right tools, a faster and more secure hosted agents experience in Foundry Agent Service (preview), and Observability in ...
Introducing the new hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service: secure, scalable compute built for agents
Agents are already transforming how developers solve problems. Whether it's a coding agent that refactors your repo overnight, a research agent that synthesizes hundreds of documents into a brief, or an ops agent that monitors and remediates infrastructure — the pattern is clear. Developers are building agents that don't just answer questions, they go do things. Agents of today don’t just execute from a list of tools. They access the underlying file system, write and execute code, and persist files and memories for long running and complex tasks. Today, it is easy to build agents locally. But how do you tak...
What’s New in Microsoft Foundry Fine-Tuning | April 2026
April 2026 brings three major Reinforcement Fine-Tuning updates: Global Training for o4-mini with lower per-token rates across 12+ regions, new GPT-4.1 model graders for richer reward signals, and a comprehensive RFT best practices guide to help you ship specialized models faster.
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | March 2026
March ships Foundry Agent Service GA with private networking, GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.4 Mini, Priority Processing, Phi-4 Reasoning Vision, SDK 2.0 GA across Python, JS/TS, Java, and .NET, Fireworks AI and NVIDIA Nemotron models, and third-party guardrails from Palo Alto and Zenity.
Foundry Local is now Generally Available
Ship local AI to millions of devices - fast, private on-device inference with no per-token costs.
Foundry Agent Service is GA: private networking, Voice Live, and enterprise-grade evaluations
The next-gen Foundry Agent Service is generally available today with end-to-end private networking, Voice Live integration, expanded MCP authentication, GA evaluations with continuous monitoring, and hosted agent deployments in six new Azure regions.
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | February 2026
February brings Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.6 with 1M-token context, GPT-Realtime-1.5 and GPT-Audio-1.5, Grok 4.0 GA, the Microsoft Agent Framework reaching Release Candidate, and the Foundry REST API quietly going GA — laying the foundation for imminent SDK GA announcements across Python, .NET, JS/TS, and Java.
Microsoft Agent Framework Reaches Release Candidate
We're happy to announce that Microsoft Agent Framework is now in Release Candidate status for both .NET and Python. Release Candidate is an important milestone on the road to General Availability — it means the API surface is stable, and all features that we intend to release with version 1.0 are complete. Whether you're building a single helpful assistant or orchestrating a team of specialized agents, Agent Framework gives you a consistent, multi-language foundation to do it. Microsoft Agent Framework is the easy and most powerful way to build agents and agent systems using Microsoft Foundry or any model or AI s...
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | Dec 2025 & Jan 2026
Catch up on all the new models, audio updates, fine-tuning expansions, and SDK updates from Microsoft Foundry spanning December 2025 and January 2026 — including GPT-5.2, Codex Max, DeepSeek V3.2, FLUX.2, and the azure-ai-projects v2 beta consolidation.
DPO Fine-Tuning Using Microsoft Foundry SDK
In the rapidly evolving landscape of large language models (LLMs), achieving precise control over model behavior while maintaining quality has become a critical challenge. While models like GPT-4 demonstrate impressive capabilities, ensuring their outputs align with human preferences—whether for safety, helpfulness, or style—requires sophisticated fine-tuning techniques. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) represents a breakthrough approach that simplifies this alignment process while delivering exceptional results. This comprehensive guide explores DPO fine-tuning, explaining what it is, how it works, when t...
Beyond the Prompt – Why and How to Fine-tune Your Own Models
Large Language Models (LLMs) have reached a point where general intelligence is no longer the bottleneck. The real challenge in enterprise AI systems behavioral alignment ensuring models that produce consistent, reliable, policy-compliant outputs on a scale. Prompt engineering and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) are powerful but they do not change model behavior. Fine-tuning will solve this by customizing a pretrained AI model with additional training on a specific task or dataset to improve performance, add new skills, or enhance accuracy. This post explores what Microsoft Foundry fine-tuning is, when us...
Building an AI Skills Executor in .NET: Bringing Anthropic’s Agent Pattern to the Microsoft Ecosystem
We welcome guest author, Matt Kruczek, to share how to build a complete Skills Executor in .NET, combining Azure OpenAI with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) C# SDK to bring the same agentic patterns to the Microsoft ecosystem. You’ll see how to define reusable skills, connect local and external tools, and orchestrate intelligent agent loops—so enterprise teams can standardize AI behavior without hardcoding business logic.
What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | October and November 2025
Azure AI Foundry is now Microsoft Foundry. Read the latest announcements about agents, models, tools and more.
Foundry IQ in Microsoft Agent Framework
Build enterprise-grade RAG agents with Foundry IQ Knowledge Bases in ~20 lines of Python. Learn how the Azure AI Search Context Provider brings intelligent, multi-hop retrieval to the Microsoft Agent Framework—no fragmented pipelines, just plug in the knowledge your agent needs.
Announcing Foundry MCP Server (preview) in the cloud, speeding up AI development with Microsoft Foundry
MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a standard protocol that enables AI agents to securely connect with apps, data, and systems, supporting easy interoperability and seamless platform expansion. At Ignite, Microsoft Foundry introduced Foundry Tools, which serves as a central hub for discovering, connecting, and managing both public and private MCP tools securely, simplifying integration across more than 1,400 business systems and empowering agents. Microsoft Foundry also upleveled Foundry Agent Service to empower developers to securely build, manage, and connect AI agents with Foundry Tools, enabling seamless integra...
⭐Upcoming Virtual Event⭐ AI Dev Days, Level-Up Your AI Skills with Microsoft Reactor
Join us for AI Dev Days, a two-day virtual event exploring the latest Microsoft Azure, Foundry and GitHub innovations. Whether you’re modernizing legacy apps, building with agents, or exploring the newest AI models, this is your moment to skill up, ship faster, and connect with experts.
Introducing Memory in Foundry Agent Service
Give your agents the power to remember Imagine your agent never asks the same question twice. Until now, most agents have been stateless. Each conversation resets to zero, forgetting what users said just minutes ago or weeks ago. Developers tried to bridge this gap with homegrown solutions — storing embeddings in databases, manually retrieving prior messages, or stuffing entire chat histories into prompts. These workarounds add latency, cost, and complexity, and still fall short of delivering truly personal, context-aware interactions. At Ignite 2025, we introduced the public preview of memory in Foundry Ag...
Translation Customization, A Developer’s Guide to Adaptive Custom Translation
Introduction Translation isn’t just converting words—it’s enabling global communication. Yet for businesses operating worldwide, achieving accuracy, speed, and domain-specific terminology has been a persistent challenge. Market trends show that 70% of consumers prefer content in their native language, and enterprises are under pressure to deliver real-time multilingual experiences without sacrificing quality. That’s why we’re introducing Adaptive Custom Translation (AdaptCT) in Microsoft Foundry Tools—a breakthrough that redefines how translation systems are customized. Instead of retraining models from scr...
Introducing Multi-Agent Workflows in Foundry Agent Service
Across industries, organizations are moving from experimenting with single agents to running AI at the center of their business operations. While single agents excel at focused tasks, customers quickly discover that real enterprise work stretches across multiple steps, involves different roles, and requires strong governance. To operationalize AI in this environment, teams need a dependable way to coordinate agents, tools, and logic into complete, end-to-end processes. Over the past year, as customers deployed agents into production, the same challenges surfaced across industries: At M...
Azure Content Understanding is now generally available
At Microsoft Ignite this year, we’re excited to announce that Azure Content Understanding in Foundry Tools is now generally available (GA). Over the past months, we’ve seen preview usage across industries, from large consultancies to healthcare leaders, with invaluable customer feedback shaping this release. With this GA release, we’re enabling flexibility and control with model choice, production-grade reliability, expanded region availability, and broader scenario coverage. In addition, this update brings tight integration with Microsoft Foundry Models, Foundry IQ powered by Azure AI Search, and agent ecosys...
Assess Agentic Risks with the AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry
Accelerate your trustworthy AI journey with the enhanced AI Red Teaming Agent in Microsoft Foundry. Empower developers to automate adversarial testing for both models and agentic systems—covering risks like prompt injection, prohibited actions, sensitive data leakage, and task adherence. Integrate red teaming into your CI/CD pipelines using the Foundry SDK and no-code UI wizard, enabling continuous safety evaluation and rapid prototyping. With PyRIT’s open-source attack strategies and customizable risk definitions, you can systematically probe vulnerabilities, benchmark improvements, and ensure robust safeguards ...
Foundry Local comes to Android—plus on-device speech, on-prem support, and a simpler SDK
Today, we’re introducing a powerful new way to bring AI directly to your mobile apps: Foundry Local on Android. Starting now, you can build Android applications that run AI on-device—no cloud round trips required. Sign up for the gated preview here: https://aka.ms/foundrylocal-androidprp Most of us now carry a computer in our pocket. These devices are now powerful enough to run AI models locally, unlocking speed, privacy, and flexibility. With Foundry Local, you can easily deploy optimized open-source models from Microsoft Foundry directly on mobile devices. Why on-device AI matters: Foundry Local...
How to debug and optimize RAG agents in Microsoft Foundry
TL;DR Learn the best practices to evaluate and optimize the RAG quality of your agent using evaluations in Foundry Observability. This tutorial demonstrates these 2 best practices before deploying your RAG agent: 1. Evaluate and optimize end to end your RAG agent using reference-free RAG triad evaluators: Groundedness and Relevance evaluators; 2. For advanced search use case requiring ground truths and more precise measurement of retrieval quality, optimize your Search parameters using golden metrics such as XDCG and Max Relevance: Document Retrieval evaluator Framing Agent Observability Agents can be po...
Introducing GPT-4o Audio Models in Microsoft Foundry: A Practical Guide for Developers
How to get started with Azure OpenAI's next-generation GPT-4o audio models for transcription and text-to-speech applications.
Announcing Azure Language in Foundry Tools for deterministic, privacy-first agents
In today’s rapidly evolving AI landscape, developers are seeking reliable, secure, and predictable language capabilities to power the next generation of enterprise-grade agents. As agentic architecture becomes central to modern applications, teams need tools that deliver stronger privacy guarantees, deterministic behavior, and seamless integration across their AI stack. As part of the broader transition from Azure AI Services into unified Microsoft Foundry Tools, we’re excited to introduce the rebranded Azure Language in Foundry Tools with new enhancements purpose-built for agent development. Today’s release b...
Session Guide to Microsoft Foundry @ Microsoft Ignite: Must-See Developer Sessions
Microsoft Ignite 2025 is the ultimate opportunity for developers to dive deep into what’s new with Azure AI Foundry. We curated the top sessions designed for hands-on learning, practical demos, and expert insights. Whether you’re building AI apps, orchestrating multi-agent systems, or interested in exploring new developer tools, this guide will help you plan your event schedule whether you are attending in person or joining virtually! Don’t miss this Innovation Session Build and Manage AI Apps with Your Agent Factory | BRK1706 Step into the era of agentic AI with an open, modular platform for building and ma...
A Developer’s Guide to Fine-Tuning GPT-4o for Image Classification on Azure AI Foundry
Whether you’re a machine learning practitioner, app developer, or just curious about the latest in AI, this guide shows how you can quickly boost image classification accuracy using cutting-edge Vision-Language Models (VLM) on Azure—no deep learning expertise required. In this walkthrough, you’ll see how to fine-tune GPT-4o on Azure OpenAI for image classification using the Stanford Dogs dataset. Illustrations of some of dogs' breeds images presented on the dataset. We’ll use the Vision Fine-Tuning API and compare the results to a lightweight CNN baseline, so you can see the impact of modern Vision-Languag...
The Developer’s Guide to Smarter Fine-tuning: Unlock custom AI for every business challenge
Azure AI Foundry makes fine-tuning smarter, faster, and more accessible than ever. Whether you’re building agents that reason, tools that adapt, or workflows that scale, this is your launchpad for customizing models to solve real business challenges. Dive in to discover best practices, hands-on resources, and the latest innovations so you can build, test, and deploy specialized AI with confidence. What is Fine-tuning? Fine-tuning refers to customizing a pre-trained LLM with additional training on a specific task or new dataset for enhanced performance, new skills, or improved accuracy. So instead of building ...
What’s new in Azure AI Foundry | September 2025
GPT‑5‑Codex GA, Sora video‑to‑video preview, Grok 4 Fast, Browser Automation & Key Vault previews, new Search knowledge sources, Voice Live GA.
Introducing Microsoft Agent Framework: The Open-Source Engine for Agentic AI Apps
Why agents need a new foundation Over the last year, developers have been experimenting with AI agents in every imaginable form. Agents are not just chatbots or copilots — they are autonomous software components that can reason about goals, call tools and APIs, collaborate with other agents, and adapt dynamically. Whether it’s a retrieval agent for research, a coding agent embedded in a dev workflow, or a compliance agent ensuring policy enforcement, agents are becoming the next layer of application logic. Yet despite the excitement, the path from prototype to production has been fraught with obstacles. Many ...
Foundry Local Meets More Silicon
Foundry Local is a high-performance local AI runtime stack that brings Azure AI Foundry’s power to client devices. Foundry Local lets you build and ship cross-platform AI apps that run models with acceleration on a wide range of hardware. The Evolution of AI Acceleration On-device AI has progressed rapidly. Early workloads ran on CPUs, but performance and power limits made real-time inference difficult. GPUs improved things with parallelism, faster inference. The latest breakthrough is NPUs (Neural Processing Units), designed specifically for neural networks. NPUs deliver far greater efficiency and throughput...
AI-Assisted Development powered by Local Models
Developers have long struggled with concerns about data privacy, restrictive cloud dependencies, and limited control over their AI tools—especially when working on sensitive projects or within regulated industries. Now, with the excitement surrounding local models, you can harness AI directly on your device, ensuring your data stays private and your workflow remains fully customizable. The big breakthrough: Foundry Local empowers you to use local AI models seamlessly with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, giving you privacy, flexibility, and offline capabilities without compromise. Foundry Local is a cutti...
Ground Your Agents Faster with Native Azure AI Search Indexing in Foundry
Instantly create a production-ready Azure AI Search vector index directly inside Azure AI Foundry when grounding your agent—no prior search setup required.
Announcing Computer Use tool (Preview) in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service
Overview We are excited to announce Computer Use—are now available in preview in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service. It brings feature parity with the Azure OpenAI Responses API, but with the added advantage of seamless integration into the Foundry agent runtime and enterprise security. With this release, developers can create agents that not only reason over text, retrieve knowledge, or call APIs, but also directly interact with computer interfaces through natural language instructions. At launch, it is accessible through REST API and SDK, giving developers the flexibility to embed them directly into their applica...
What’s new in Azure AI Foundry | August 2025
August 2025 highlights GPT‑5 arrives in Foundry, Model Router adds GPT‑5 support, Responses API is GA, Browser Automation enters public preview, plus Sora updates, Mistral Document AI, FLUX image models, OpenAI gpt‑oss with Foundry Local, and SDK/documentation updates.
Unlocking GPT-5’s Freeform Tool Calling: A New Era of Seamless Integration
GPT-5 models are now available in Azure AI Foundry via Azure OpenAI. Designed for advanced reasoning and generation. One of the core capabilities of the model is tool calling, which enables it to interact with external systems by generating and sending raw text directly to tools. What Is Freeform Tool Calling in GPT-5? Freeform tool calling is a powerful capability in GPT-5 that allows the model to send raw text payloads like Python scripts, SQL queries, or configuration files directly to external tools without needing to wrap them in structured JSON. This means the model can generate code or text in the ...
Announcing the Browser Automation Tool (Preview) in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service
Overview Today, we are excited to announce the Browser Automation Tool (Preview) as the newest action tool in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service through API and SDK. This tool enables developers to build agents capable of performing real-world browser tasks—such as searching, navigating, filling forms, booking appointments, and more—through natural language prompts. Powered by Playwright Workspaces, Browser Automation Tool brings isolated, cloud-hosted browser automation to your AI agents, supporting multi-turn interactions that mimic a real user’s browsing experience. Key Benefits ...
What’s new in Azure AI Foundry | July 2025
July 2025 brings Deep Research Agent (public preview), GPT-image-1 model enhancements, new developer tools, and platform, security, and SDK updates to Azure AI Foundry.
Building AI Agents with the A2A .NET SDK
Learn how to build collaborative AI agents using the new A2A .NET SDK, enabling seamless communication and discovery between autonomous agents in the AI ecosystem.
What’s new in Azure AI Foundry | June 2025
Latest features and updates in Azure AI Foundry for June 2025, featuring major model releases, Agent Service GA, enhanced developer tools, and significant portal improvements.
Announcing Model Context Protocol Support (preview) in Azure AI Foundry Agent Service
Generative-AI agents only become useful when they can do things—query systems of record, trigger workflows, or look up specialized knowledge. Until now that meant hand-rolling Azure Functions, managing OpenAPI specs, or writing custom plug-ins for every backend you own. MCP changes the economics: it is an open, JSON-RPC–based protocol—originally proposed by Anthropic—that lets a “server” publish tools (functions) and resources (context) once and have any compliant “client” (your agent runtime) discover and call them automatically. Think “USB-C for AI integrations.” With today’s preview, Foundry Agent Serv...
codex-mini: Fast, Scalable Code Generation for the CLI Era
We’re announcing the general availability of Azure OpenAI’s codex-mini in Azure AI Foundry Models. codex-mini is a fine-tuned version of the o4-mini model, designed to deliver rapid, instruction-following performance for developers working in CLI workflows. Whether you're automating shell commands, editing scripts, or refactoring repositories, codex-mini brings speed, precision, and scalability to your terminal. Why codex-mini? For full pricing details across all Azure OpenAI models, visit the Azure OpenAI pricing. How to use Azure OpenAI cod...
o-series Updates: New o3 pricing and o3-pro in Azure AI Foundry
Learn about o3-pro, the latest Azure OpenAI reasoning model available in Azure AI Foundry. Get access and start building your applications.
Enhancing Conversational Agents with Azure AI Language Conversational Language Understanding and Custom Question Answering
As we focus our work on empowering the agent design experience, a list of the new features in the we published earlier this week, including the intent triage agent and the exact question-answering agent, utilizing Conversational language understanding (CLU) and Custom question answering (CQA). We’re excited to share new enhancements to the customization experiences in CLU and CQA that are officially available today. Customization in AI Foundry We’re excited to announce that both Conversational Language Understanding (CLU) and Custom Question Answering (CQA) are now fully integrated into the AI Foundry, unlockin...
The Future of Semantic Kernel: A Commitment to Innovation and Collaboration
Semantic Kernel is Microsoft’s core framework for enterprise AI orchestration, remaining secure, stable, and rapidly evolving with unified multi-agent support and deep Azure integration, backed by ongoing investment and a clear long-term roadmap.
Go from prompt to playback with Sora from Azure OpenAI in the video playground in Azure AI Foundry
The video playground in Azure AI Foundry is a high-fidelity testbed for prototyping with cutting-edge video generation models like Sora from Azure OpenAI. It offers a controlled environment for developers to experiment with prompt structures, evaluate model consistency, and optimize outputs for industry use cases.
Code quicker with Azure AI Foundry playgrounds and Visual Studio Code
The "Open in VS Code" workflow, part of the Azure AI Foundry extension for Visual Studio Code, accelerates developer velocity by integrating agent or model API endpoints and code samples into a new workspace in VS Code for Web. This feature streamlines the development process, enabling rapid prototyping and deployment with just one click.
Azure AI Foundry MCP Server May 2025 Update: Adding Models, Knowledge & Evaluation
Major expansion of Azure AI Foundry MCP Server with new Models, Knowledge Management, and Evaluation capabilities joining the existing Agent Services, enabling developers to interact with Azure AI through natural language.
Introducing New Tools and Features in the Responses API in Azure AI Foundry
With the introduction of the Responses API, Microsoft is enabling a new standard for AI development within the Azure ecosystem. Originally launched by OpenAI and now natively supported in Azure AI Foundry, the Responses API combines the simplicity of the Chat Completions API with the advanced tool-calling capabilities of the Assistants API. It offers a streamlined way to build powerful agentic experiences by allowing developers to structure prompts, invoke tools, and manage outputs—all within a single API call. Today, we’re excited to roll out powerful new capabilities in the Responses API in Azure OpenAI, ena...