Microsoft Foundry Blog
Your source for learning and building with our models, agents, and tools.
Latest posts
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...