Foundry-Agent-Service

Microsoft’s Build 2026 announcement, Frontier models and production agents advancing Microsoft Foundry for the agentic era, reframes Foundry from a model catalog into a place you run production agents. The headline that makes it real: hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service are now generally available, and the catalog spans both OpenAI and Anthropic frontier models (1,900+ on Microsoft Learn, not the “11,000” some coverage repeats).

I was at Microsoft Ignite for the Foundry announcements, and the framing runs ahead of the substance. Microsoft rebranded most of its Azure AI stack as Microsoft Foundry: one PaaS spanning models, agents, tools, knowledge, and governance. Underneath the launch-day gloss, three things actually matter to anyone shipping enterprise agents.