Posts tagged with "Microsoft Foundry"

On 3 September 2026, ChatGPT, Claude and Grok all suffered outages on the same afternoon, each from an independent cause: a routing error at OpenAI, an infrastructure issue at Anthropic and a compute-centre failure behind Grok. A runtime failover plan for Azure teams: Foundry's model router with automatic fallback, APIM's AI gateway and circuit breaker, what redundancy really costs, and the Data Zone and DORA constraints that shape it.

GPT-6 Astra arrived in Microsoft Foundry on 3 September 2026 at $10/$50 per million tokens, the same list price as Claude Fable 5.1 and 2.5x GPT-5.6 Sol on promo, behind a Limited Access gate and with no EU Data Zone. The cost math on document jobs and 60-turn agent loops, the 272K long-context cliff, what the Critical cyber rating means for refusals, and how a Swedish team should handle residency until the EU zone lands at its new 20% premium.

Claude Fable 5.1 keeps Fable 5's $10/$50 pricing but cuts cache reads to $0.25 per million tokens, which turns a 60-turn agent session from $17.25 into $10.50 and shrinks the premium over Opus 5 from 2x to about 22%. On Microsoft Foundry it ships Anthropic-hosted only, with no EU data zone, no Batches API, a zero default quota on pay-as-you-go, mandatory 30-day retention until Enterprise Frontier Safeguards arrive, and three breaking changes for teams migrating from Fable 5.

OpenAI will stop supplying models to Cursor on 12 November 2026, invoking a change-of-control clause after SpaceX's $60 billion acquisition, and Cursor absorbed it because OpenAI carried only 5 percent of its traffic. For Azure buyers the lesson is a model exit plan: what Foundry's lifecycle policy and Microsoft's OpenAI licence actually guarantee, where Claude's EU Data Zone gap bites, the cost of a warm second source, and what DORA already requires.

From 1 September 2026 Microsoft Foundry charges 20 percent over Global for EU Data Zone deployments, up from 10 percent, and 30 percent for Sweden Central regional, while Global pricing stays flat and West Europe regional hits 50 percent. Pay-as-you-go customers only pay the new rate on models launched from today, PTU customers pay immediately, and GPT-5.6 is not yet on regional Standard in Sweden, so here is the cost math and a six-step checklist.

Anthropic prices prompt caching with three numbers: a 1.25x or 2x premium on cache writes depending on TTL, a 0.1x rate on cache reads, and the base input rate for everything after the last breakpoint. This deep-dive verifies every figure against the current official docs and covers per-model minimums, break-even math, batch stacking and how Claude on Azure converts it all into CCUs.

Cohere Parse v5 landed in Microsoft Foundry on 27 August 2026 at $1.50 per 1,000 pages, the same price as Document Intelligence Read and under a third of Content Understanding's layout meter. We price all four Azure document parsers in Sweden Central at 100k, 1M and 10M pages a month, then weigh the saving against Parse's missing confidence scores, absent Swedish language support and preview-only status.

The Azure OpenAI Assistants API reached its retirement date on 26 August 2026, and the classic Foundry Agent Service it underpins retires 31 March 2027. A step-by-step migration guide to the new Foundry Agent Service on the Responses API: threads become conversations, runs become responses, assistants become versioned agents, and Microsoft's migration tool rewrites code but not stored state.

Google shipped gemini-3.7-flash as generally available on 13 August 2026 at an introductory $0.75/$3.75 per million tokens, two weeks after OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna by 80 percent and days after Anthropic locked Claude Sonnet 5 at $2/$10 permanently. We compare the three workhorse models on list price, context, Azure availability and EU residency, and show why cost per completed task beats cost per token.

Anthropic will weave an invisible watermark into Claude's text output to meet the EU AI Act's Article 50 marking obligation, applying it globally across the API, apps and cloud platforms including Microsoft Foundry. What the mark can and cannot prove, which deployer duties remain yours, and when a DIY provenance layer still earns its keep on Azure.

Anthropic has cancelled the Claude Sonnet 5 price increase scheduled for 1 September 2026, making the introductory $2 input / $10 output per million tokens the permanent standard price. For teams running Claude on Azure through Microsoft Foundry, that removes a planned 50% jump from autumn budgets and reshapes the mid-tier price comparison against GPT-5.6 Terra and Gemini 3.1 Pro.

OpenAI cut GPT-5.6 Luna prices by 80 percent and Terra by 20 percent on 30 July 2026, and Microsoft confirmed the same decreases reach Azure OpenAI Global Standard deployments from 1 August. For Swedish and EU teams running these models on Azure, the cuts move the break-even point for PTU reservations, model routing and residency premiums, so the autumn budget math deserves a fresh pass before any new one-year commitments.

Claude Opus 5 launched on 24 July 2026 at $5/$25 per million tokens with a 1M context window and day-one availability in Microsoft Foundry. For long-running agents the per-token price is the wrong unit: we work through cost per completed task against Sonnet 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol, and flag the EU data-residency caveat Swedish Azure teams need to check first.

Microsoft and Mistral announced an expanded partnership on 21 July 2026: Mistral Medium 3.5 and OCR 4 arrive in Microsoft Foundry and Copilot Studio, deployable from Azure cloud to customer-controlled and fully air-gapped Azure Local environments, backed by a multibillion-dollar European GPU buildout. We compare the three deployment modes and what each one solves for Swedish public sector and regulated industries.

GPT-5.6 (Sol, Terra, Luna) went GA in Microsoft Foundry on 9 July 2026, day-and-date with OpenAI, alongside a new Asia-Pacific Data Zone and a hosted agents runtime with VNet integration. A practical guide for Swedish and EU Azure teams: choosing between the three models, picking Global Standard versus EU Data Zone versus PTUs, worked cost math on the launch prices, and a two-week adoption checklist.

OpenAI released the GPT-5.6 series on 9 July 2026 in three tiers: Sol for hard reasoning and long autonomous runs, Terra for everyday work and Luna for speed and cost, with same-day availability in Microsoft Foundry and a new preferred-model role in Microsoft 365 Copilot. This playbook maps Azure workloads to the right tier, works the token math in SEK and flags the Copilot subprocessor setting Swedish admins must review before 24 July.

Anthropic launched Claude Sonnet 5 on 30 June 2026 at an introductory 2/10 dollars per million tokens, posting 63.2% on SWE-bench Pro and near-Opus agentic performance at 40-60% of the cost per task. We run the cost math against Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.5, set out a routing framework for when the cheap model wins, and draw the continuity lesson from the eighteen-day Fable and Mythos export-control pause.

Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Haiku 4.5 are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry, hosted on Azure with Entra ID authentication, prompt caching, extended thinking and billing through Claude Consumption Units on your existing Azure invoice. Deployment steps, the CCU cost model compared with Azure OpenAI, and the data-residency caveats Swedish and EU teams should assess before production use.

Microsoft Build 2026 turned Foundry into a full production-agent stack: Foundry IQ for unified retrieval, Toolboxes for managed tool access, agent memory, Voice Live and the experimental Scout Autopilot. Foundry IQ knowledge bases and Voice Live are generally available now, Toolboxes and memory sit in public preview, and Scout remains experimental, which sets the build, pilot and watch lanes for an Azure-first EU team.

A deep dive into Microsoft Entra Agent ID, the control plane for AI agent identity in 2026. Covers identity blueprints, attended and unattended authentication, tool-level RBAC, conditional access, OBO flows across multi-agent systems, and the audit logging that satisfies DORA, NIS2, and AI Act obligations.

See the magic happen in real time. Learn how to train and deploy custom reasoning models with Azure ML and Microsoft Foundry—from fine-tuning to reinforcement learning, performance optimization with speculative decoding, distillation, and production deployment delivering measurable ROI.

Microsoft Ignite BRK203: Reasoning models as the brains behind autonomous agents. Multi-step problem solving, explainable decisions, agentic workflows (lead scoring, content generation, support). Foundry 11,000+ model catalog, customer stories from healthcare and legal sectors.

From scientific research to enterprise AI transformation, discover how Microsoft Foundry unifies models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and more into one secure platform. Learn intelligent model routing, cost optimization, and the game-changing Claude integration.

Microsoft Ignite BRK194: Model Context Protocol (MCP) standardizes agent-tool communication across platforms. Azure API Center integration, federated registries, cross-cloud orchestration, and enterprise governance for scalable agentic ecosystems.

Ride the agent revolution with Microsoft Foundry, the enterprise-ready Agent Factory. Build, test, and launch intelligent agents with 1,400+ tools, 11,000+ models, multi-agent orchestration, and seamless Microsoft 365 integration—all with bulletproof security and governance.

Microsoft Ignite BRK188: Fine-tuning in Microsoft Foundry transforms generic models into production-ready agents. Synthetic data generation, supervised + reinforcement fine-tuning, 40-90% cost reduction, 95%+ accuracy. Real-world results: 2M docs/day, $27M savings.