What’s new today
GPT‑5.6 is generally available in Microsoft Foundry, alongside the Asia-Pacific Data Zone, and hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service.
AI only creates value when it shows up in real systems—systems that are reliable, observable, and aligned to business outcomes. More than 100,000 organizations are already building on Microsoft Foundry, and companies like Adobe, Telefónica, and Tata Consultancy Services are running agents in production today.
At Microsoft Build, we laid out a simple promise for the agentic era: developers should be able to build an agent where they already work, run it on infrastructure they can trust, and put it in front of the people who need it— without stitching together disconnected platforms. Today, that vision moves from roadmap to reality with three sets of updates now generally available in Microsoft Foundry:
Together, these capabilities bring frontier models, production agent runtime, enterprise-grade identity, security, and compliance controls, and distribution across Microsoft 365 into a single platform—helping organizations move from experimentation to production without assembling disconnected tools and services.
Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft’s end-to-end platform for building, running, governing, and distributing AI agents. Foundry brings together the capabilities organizations need to move agents into production across three pillars:
These pillars come together in the latest Foundry updates, helping organizations build, run, and scale production agents on a single platform.
Agent development starts where developers already work—in GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) Code—with the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code and the Foundry skill handling deployment to Foundry. Whether teams build with Microsoft Agent Framework, GitHub Copilot SDK (generally available), or Claude Agent SDK, Foundry is the production destination—and it all starts with the right model.
An agent is only as capable as the model reasoning behind it. Microsoft Foundry gives organizations access to industry-leading frontier, open-source, and task-specific models through a single platform, allowing teams to choose the right model for every workload.
Today, we’re making OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 series generally available in Microsoft Foundry Models and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service:
Together, the GPT-5.6 series gives organizations the flexibility to match model capability, cost, and performance requirements to specific business scenarios, rather than forcing every workload onto a single model.
Customers consistently tell us that access to new models matters as much as model quality. That’s why we are making GPT-5.6 available through Global Standard and Global Priority Processing for all the existing 28 global regions, Data Zones Standard, and Global Provisioned from day one. This enables customers to adopt the latest frontier AI innovations where they have already built, deployed, and scaled their applications.
| Model | Deployment | Pricing (USD $/million tokens) | |
| Input | Output | ||
| GPT-5.6 Sol | Standard Global | 5.00 | 30.00 |
| GPT-5.6 Terra | Standard Global | 2.50 | 15.00 |
| GPT-5.6 Luna | Standard Global | 1.00 | 6.00 |
More models, in more regions, are only half of what platform expansion means. The other half is more places to run them compliantly. This is exactly what the Asia-Pacific Data Zone delivers. Today we’re also announcing the general availability of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) Data Zone for Microsoft Foundry, enabling APAC customers to run frontier OpenAI models while keeping data processing within the Asia-Pacific regions, with no separate environment to stitch together and no waiting for capability to catch up.
With Global, Data Zone, and Regional deployment options available in Foundry, organizations can align AI adoption with their sovereignty, compliance, performance, and scale requirements while maintaining a consistent development and operations experience across environments.
As financial institutions adopt AI, responsible data handling becomes foundational to trust. Microsoft Foundry’s APAC Data Zone allows us to keep data processing regionally anchored while accessing advanced AI models at scale. This gives us the confidence to accelerate AI innovation responsibly and reinforces our ambition to be a leading AI-powered financial platform in Asia.
—Hongsoo Kim, Chief Data and AI Officer (CDAO), Viva Republica (Toss)
A capable model is only the starting point. To put one to work in production, an agent also needs somewhere to run, knowledge of your business, governed access to its tools, memory that carries across interactions and acts on real-world events, and a path to the people who use it. Foundry provides each of these as a built-in capability, designed to work together.
An agent you can’t see, improve, or secure is an agent you can’t put in production—so Foundry treats trust as a platform priority, not a developer responsibility. What’s new in this release closes the loop around everything that happens after you build: seeing what an agent did, making it better, and proving it’s worth running.
As agents scale from pilots to thousands of runs a day, Foundry gives teams the levers to keep spend predictable without leaving the platform.
That starts with choice.
On top of that foundation, model router matches each request to the right model, prompt caching cuts redundant computation, and PTU spillover and quota optimization preserve service continuity through usage spikes. For agents, toolboxes in Foundry send only the tools each request needs, and agent optimizer tunes prompts, skills, tools, and model choice against your own evaluators.
And spend is only half the equation. ROI for agents in Foundry connects business value, usage, and cost in one view—so teams can see whether a production agent is creating more value than it costs to run, and where cost is outpacing value.
For a hands-on walkthrough, watch our new Microsoft Mechanics episode on token economics for agents.
The organizations building on Foundry aren’t experimenting; they’re shipping, from digital natives to the world’s largest enterprises.
The pattern is consistent: teams that once spent weeks integrating, securing, and deploying agents are now doing it in days, on infrastructure that meets their compliance bar, reaching users through tools they already trust.
Everything in this post is live in Microsoft Foundry.
Follow the documentation and Microsoft Learn courses. Developers can get started in minutes by following the Quickstart, which walks through setting up, testing, and deploying a production-ready hosted agent end to end.
Check out AI Agents for Beginners for a 12-lesson curriculum, then go deeper with guided labs: Develop AI Agents in Azure, Hosted Agents Workshop (.NET), the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code and hosted agents workshop, and the ZavaShop Supply Chain Workshop. To put your agents on a solid quality footing, read Evaluating AI Agents: A Practical Guide with Microsoft Foundry.
Watch: Foundry Agent Service + Microsoft Agent Framework Explained—Jeff Hollan walks through how to operationalize AI agents from deployment to real-world impact.
此内容由惯性聚合(RSS阅读器)自动聚合整理，仅供阅读参考。 原文来自 — 版权归原作者所有。