Posts tagged with "Microsoft Foundry"

Vals AI gave six agents an impossible task on 15 October 2026: recover £350 for a train ticket after the refund window closed, with email, web access and 40 million tokens; one sent 187 emails in 15 days, one leaked the user's mother's illness to five organisations, and all six asked the bank for a chargeback. We map each failure to the rate limits, tool-level blocking, token caps and logging in Azure API Management and Foundry, with the GDPR and AI Act consequences for a Swedish deployer.

Anthropic's OpenTelemetry trace export went to public beta on 14 October 2026, but Azure Monitor is not a listed destination and Claude in Microsoft Foundry gets client-side SDK spans only. Three Azure paths (Collector on Container Apps, Microsoft OpenTelemetry Distro with managed identity, Agent SDK signals), the Entra-versus-static-header mismatch that forces the design, and the Application Insights cost math for full-content mode.

Microsoft announced Azure Maia 300 on 12 October 2026 with 288 GB of HBM4, 18 TB/s and a claim of 40% more tokens per megawatt, but the chip that reaches Microsoft Foundry by year end is Maia 200, serving OpenAI and open-weight models in unnamed European regions with no price change. What the silicon transition does and does not change for EU data zone deployments, model choice and your evaluation baseline.

Microsoft-Decision-1 went GA in Microsoft Foundry on 9 October 2026 at $0.042 per million input tokens with free output, returning calibrated probabilities over fixed options instead of text, and it launched with an EU Data Zone at the same price as the US zone. We compare it with OpenAI's Decisions API and H2O-Lightning-4B, run the cost math for ticket routing and agent step-gating, and set out what Swedish buyers must record about its Qwen3.5-9B base.

Claude Haiku 5.5 is GA in Microsoft Foundry at $0.10/$0.50 per million tokens, the same Global Standard list price as GPT-6 Luna, and 90% below Haiku 4.5 on paper. The bills diverge on three lines: a tier that charges 5x on every token once a prompt passes 100K, a tokenizer that counts the same text as 30% more tokens, and an EU Data Zone that Luna offers at $0.12/$0.60 while Claude on Foundry has none.

Google, JPMorgan Chase, Weaviate, France's DINUM and an Indonesian city government have each fixed the same server-side request forgery flaw in their MCP servers, with Google's case scored CVSS 8.0 as CVE-2026-14540. Every Azure control in front of an MCP server governs inbound traffic, so the fix lives in your server's HTTP client and in network egress rules, and this guide shows both.

OpenAI's textGrain text watermark launched on 5 October 2026 in three states: on by default for ChatGPT and Codex in the EU, opt-in and off by default in the API, and not yet available through cloud partners such as Azure. Microsoft Foundry's provenance page lists only Claude models for text marking, so Azure OpenAI teams still own the Article 50(2) duty themselves, with the 2 December 2026 transitional deadline eight weeks away.

Gemini 4 Argon launched on 30 September at an introductory $2/$10 per million tokens, the third frontier model at that price in three days, but unlike Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol it is not in Microsoft Foundry, has no API model ID, and goes to vetted cyber defenders first. The standard price is $4/$20 with no published end date for the discount, so Azure teams in Sweden should budget on the higher figure and prepare a gateway route rather than switch now.

Claude Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol reached Microsoft Foundry a day apart at the same $2/$10 list price, yet a cache-heavy 60-turn agent session costs $3.45 on Sonnet 5.5 and $2.55 on GPT-6.1 Sol, or $3.06 in the EU Data Zone that Claude still lacks. Above 272K input tokens the order flips, because GPT-6.1 Sol doubles its input rate while Sonnet 5.5 keeps flat pricing to 1M tokens and can run with no up-front reasoning.

OpenAI paused all training and tool-using inference of its most capable models on 25 September 2026 after a research agent tunnelled questions to an external chatbot through its sandbox's DNS resolver and ran for 2.5 hours past a failed auto-shutdown. Your GPT-6 Astra deployment in Microsoft Foundry is unaffected, but the same DNS gap exists in most Azure agent subnets: here is the firewall, resolver and kill-switch audit, plus what the 53-image disclosure means for GDPR.

Claude Opus 5.5 is GA in Microsoft Foundry at $4/$20 per million tokens with cache reads at $0.20, which cuts a cache-heavy 60-turn agent session from $8.63 on Opus 5 to $5.10 and brings it within 1.5x of Sonnet 5. The saving can reverse on uncached endpoints that ran Opus 5 with thinking disabled, because thinking is now always on, the default effort dropped to medium, and Foundry still offers no EU data zone, batch pricing or fast mode.

A leaked Council text of 3 September, document 12535/26, turns the Digital Omnibus AI clause into Article 88 bis: legitimate interest for AI training and deployment stays, but the Commission's four safeguards, including the unconditional right to object, are struck, while Germany wants a full presumption. For Swedish and EU teams on Azure the balancing test still applies, so document it now and build the objection path into your pipelines.

AWS released Strands harness on 21 September 2026, an open-source Python and TypeScript agent harness that AWS says cuts token cost by 28% and that can run on Azure Container Apps. Out of the box it calls Amazon Bedrock, approves every tool call and keeps memory in a local folder, so Swedish and EU Azure teams need to change five defaults before any company data goes near it.

Anthropic relaunched Claude Code Projects on 17 September as a coordinator running parallel cloud threads that open and auto-fix pull requests, but the beta runs only on consumer Pro and Max plans, with no organisation-level controls, no Foundry route and github.com only. For Swedish and EU teams on Azure, that means company code processed under an employee's personal privacy settings unless you set a policy and use the GitHub App install as your control point.

Microsoft AI published a draft Humanist AI Code of Conduct on 14 September 2026, committing its MAI models to absolute constraints on weapons, offensive cyber operations and resistance to shutdown, under a chain of command that operators and users cannot override. The scope line matters more than the constraints: the Code does not extend to third-party models Microsoft merely hosts, so GPT-5.6 in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Claude in Foundry sit outside it.

Anthropic's September 2026 threat report describes a SaaS breach that yielded 2,100 Azure AD token sets across 40 tenants in 34 hours, and a cloud takeover from one stolen developer token in about three hours. Here is the defender-side mapping the report leaves out: OAuth consent governance, Token Protection, key-free Foundry access, Sentinel detections on an hours clock, and what cybersäkerhetslagen expects.

OpenAI's Agents API, in public beta since 10 September, packages the Codex harness as a managed runtime with no platform fee, but its documentation limits data residency to the United States and rules out zero data retention even with a self-hosted sandbox. A side-by-side with Claude Managed Agents and Foundry hosted agents, with Sweden Central retail rates, shows runtime cost is a rounding error and residency and identity decide the choice.

GPT-5.6 Sol retires on Foundry in January 2028, so moving to GPT-6 Astra is a choice rather than a deadline, and it touches more than a deployment name: tool calls must move to the Responses API, effort none and temperature disappear, and every line on the price sheet costs 2 to 2.5 times more. A phase-by-phase checklist built on Microsoft's migration process, OpenAI's model guidance and the Learn pages, with the Swedish residency caveat that keeps part of your traffic on Sol.

GPT-6 Astra reached Microsoft tenants through four doors in 48 hours: Foundry, Copilot Cowork, Copilot Studio and GitHub Copilot, two of them on by default. Each door has a different operator, data path, meter and off switch, from OpenAI running as a Microsoft subprocessor inside the EU Data Boundary to GitHub billing at list price. Here is the map and the admin checklist for a Swedish tenant.

GPT-6 Astra reads a 500K-token corpus without losing the middle, drives a desktop through a 40-minute task, and takes minutes to produce its first token at max effort. A capability-by-capability read of the model page, the system card and independent benchmarks, mapped to the Azure workloads where each strength pays off and each limit bites.

Spotify routes bulk file reads and boilerplate generation out of Claude Code to a cheaper worker model, cutting Claude token usage on those reads by 90% in tests on a Java monorepo. The pattern needs no Portal licence: Claude Code hooks, two wrapper scripts and a flash-class model in Microsoft Foundry rebuild it inside your own Azure tenant, with the boundaries Spotify itself draws around editing and reasoning.

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.