What's New in Microsoft Foundry — June 2026

[nicholasdbrady]

Summary

Claude reached general availability in Microsoft Foundry this month. Here's everything else that shipped between Build 2026 and the end of June.

Agents

• Claude (GA): Messages API, prompt caching, extended thinking, tool streaming. Foundry Agent Service can use Claude as the reasoning core for multi-step agents.
• Publish to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Teams (GA, June 10): one governed pipeline, no rebuilding per surface.
• Autopilot agents (public preview): a new agent category with its own Entra Agent ID, email, calendar, and Teams presence, designed for shared spaces like group chats. Reference sample: Workstream Manager.

Toolboxes & Routines (all preview)

Capability	What it does
Skills	Reusable, versioned capabilities in a project-scoped catalog
Work IQ / Fabric IQ	Direct connections to enterprise data and reasoning systems
Browser Automation	MCP-native web automation on Playwright workspaces
Tool Search	Retrieves only relevant tools at runtime instead of sending the full tool list
Routines	Scheduled/triggered agent run control

azd ai toolbox create my-toolbox --from-file ./src/toolbox-agent/toolbox.yaml

Evaluation & Memory

• Agent Optimizer (private preview): evaluate → generate candidates → rank → deploy, run with azd ai agent optimize.
• Memory: procedural memory and time-to-live (TTL) controls for what an agent remembers and for how long.

Also this month

Foundry joined the OpenEnv standard for reinforcement-learning environments, Foundry Local on Azure Local added multi-node Kubernetes and air-gapped operation, and the Voice Live API added a new azure-realtime-native voice type.

Full post with all code samples and the SDK changelog: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/whats-new-in-microsoft-foundry-june-2026/

Questions, feedback, or "this broke for me" reports welcome below.