Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry)
Microsoft's Azure platform for AI apps and agents, renamed from Azure AI Foundry
Overview
Microsoft Foundry, formerly Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Studio, is Microsoft's platform for AI apps and agents: a catalogue of 11,000+ models including OpenAI, Claude and Llama, the Foundry Agent Service, Foundry IQ, evaluation and tracing. The platform is free; models and tools are billed per use.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 1 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
What you can produce with Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry)
- Model catalogue of 11,000+ models incl. OpenAI and Claude
- Foundry Agent Service on the Responses API
- Foundry IQ retrieval
- Evaluation and OpenTelemetry tracing
- SDKs, VS Code extension and MCP server
- Foundry Local on-device models
Microsoft Foundry is the natural home for teams building AI on Azure: a vast model catalogue that uniquely includes both OpenAI and Anthropic, a capable agent service with no extra charge for native agents, and solid evaluation and tracing, available in Singapore. The 2025 rename came with genuine changes — new portal, resource model and agent API, with prompt flow on its way out — so older tutorials need care. Costs depend entirely on model and tool usage. A strong choice for Azure-based organisations; others will find equivalents on AWS and Google Cloud.
What we found
Microsoft Foundry, called Azure AI Foundry until Microsoft renamed it at its Ignite conference in November 2025, is Microsoft's platform for building AI applications and agents on Azure. It began as Azure AI Studio in November 2023. Its model catalogue, which Microsoft says spans more than 11,000 models, includes OpenAI's GPT family, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, Mistral, Cohere, Moonshot, Hugging Face models and Microsoft's own MAI models, and Microsoft says Azure is the only cloud offering both OpenAI and Anthropic models. The Foundry Agent Service builds and hosts agents, now on the Responses API, with tools such as file search, code interpreter and web search, and Foundry IQ handles retrieval. Tracing built on OpenTelemetry, evaluators for coherence, relevance, groundedness and safety, and more than 1,400 pre-built connections support production use. Developers work through the portal, SDKs for Python, C#, JavaScript and Java, a VS Code extension, and a Foundry skill and MCP server for coding agents such as GitHub Copilot and Claude Code, and Foundry Local runs models on a developer's own machine.
The rename brought real changes: a new portal, with the old one now labelled Foundry classic, a single Foundry resource instead of hubs, and a new agent API. Prompt flow is being retired by April 2027 in favour of the Microsoft Agent Framework. Foundry is available in Azure's Southeast Asia region in Singapore, and Microsoft names customers including AT&T, Audi, Commerzbank, Fujitsu, KPMG and SK Telecom.
The platform itself is free to use; you pay for the models, agent hosting and tools you consume. In US East 2 on global standard deployments, GPT-5.5 costs $5 per million input tokens and $30 output, a GPT-5.6 variant $2 and $12, and GPT-5.4 nano $0.20 and $1.25. Creating and running Foundry-native agents carries no extra charge, though hosted agents and tools are billed. New Azure accounts get $200 of credit for 30 days.
There are too few independent reviews to judge. It suits organisations on Azure building production AI with models from several providers.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry)'s official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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