Learn a practical model lifecycle for Microsoft Foundry: select the right model, evaluate quality, optimize cost, operate safely, and improve as production needs change.
Microsoft Build 2026 brings a major set of Microsoft Foundry updates for developers building agents: hosted runtimes, Toolboxes, memory, Voice Live, Foundry IQ, new models, managed compute, and trust, evaluation, and observability tools.
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 vi...
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 capabiliti...
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.
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.
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.
