Introducing Anthropic’s Claude models in Microsoft Foundry: Bringing Frontier intelligence to Azure

Microsoft Foundry already offers the widest selection of models of any cloud and with today’s partnership announcement with Anthropic, we’re proud that Azure is now the only cloud providing access to both Claude and GPT frontier models to customers on one platform.

Innovation in AI is about empowering every developer and organization with the freedom to choose the right intelligence for every challenge. In today’s landscape, where business needs span from real-time chatbots to deep research agents, model choice is an essential engine of progress.

Microsoft Foundry already offers the widest selection of models of any cloud and with today’s partnership announcement with Anthropic, we’re proud that Azure is now the only cloud providing access to both Claude and GPT frontier models to customers on one platform. This milestone expands Foundry further into what it was built to be: a single place to use any model, any framework, and every enterprise control you need to build and run AI apps and agents at scale.

“We’re excited to use Anthropic Claude models from Microsoft Foundry. Having Claude’s advanced reasoning alongside GPT models in one platform gives us flexibility to build scalable, enterprise-grade workflows that move far beyond prototypes.” — Michele Catasta, President, Replit

Meet the Claude models: AI that delivers real results

According to Anthropic, Claude models are engineered for the realities of enterprise development, from tight integration with productivity tools to deep, multi-document research and agentic software development across large repositories.

All Claude models are built on Constitutional AI for safety and can now be deployed through Foundry with governance, observability, and rapid integration. This enables secure use cases like customer support agents, coding agents, and research copilots: making Claude an ideal choice for scalable, trustworthy AI.

Evolving from monolithic apps to intelligent agents

Across the tech landscape, organizations are embracing agentic AI systems. Early studies show AI agents can help boost efficiency by up to 30% for teams and stakeholders. But the challenge for most enterprises isn’t building powerful apps; it’s operationalizing them and weaving them into real workflows. Industry surveys point to a clear pattern. 78% percent of executives say the primary barrier to scaling AI impact is integrating it into core business processes.

Microsoft is uniquely positioned to address this integration gap. With Foundry, we’re bringing together leading-edge reasoning models, an open platform for innovation, and Responsible AI all within a unified environment. This empowers organizations to experiment, iterate, deploy, and scale AI with confidence, all backed by robust governance and security. This means building AI solutions that are not only powerful, but practical and ready to deliver impact at scale.

“Manus deeply utilizes Anthropic’s Claude models because of their strong capabilities in coding and long-horizon task planning, together with their prowess to handle agentic tasks. We are very excited to be using them now on Azure AI Foundry!” — Tao Zhang, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer, Manus AI.

Claude in Foundry Agent Service: From reasoning to results

Inside Foundry Agent Service, Claude models serve as the reasoning core behind intelligent, goal-driven agents. Developers can:

• Plan multi-step workflows: Leverage Claude in Foundry Agent Service to orchestrate complex, multi-stage tasks with structured reasoning and long-context understanding
• Streamline AI integration with your everyday productivity tools: Use the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to seamlessly connect Claude to data fetchers, pipelines, and external APIs, enabling dynamic actions across your stack.
• Automate data operations: Upload files for Claude to summarize, classify, or extract insights to accelerate document-driven processes with robust AI.
• Real-time model selection: Using the model router, customers can soon automatically route requests to Claude Opus 4.1, Sonnet 4.5, and Haiku 4.5. Lowering latency and delivering cost savings in production.
• Govern and operate your fleet: Foundry offers unified controls and oversight, allowing developers to operate their entire agent fleet with clear insight into cost, performance, and behavior in one connected view.

Developers can also use Claude models in Microsoft Foundry with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent.

These capabilities create a framework for AI agents to safely execute complex workflows with minimal human involvement. For example, if a deployment fails, Claude can query Azure DevOps logs, diagnose the root cause, recommend a fix, and trigger a patch deployment all automatically, using registered tools and operating within governed Azure workflows.

Claude Skills: Modular intelligence you can compose

With the Claude API, developers can define skills modular building blocks that combine:

• Natural-language instructions,
• Optional Python or Bash code, and
• Linked data files (templates, visual assets, tabular data, etc.), or APIs

Each skill is dynamically discovered, maximizing your agent’s context. Skills automate a workflow like generating reports, cleaning datasets, or assembling PowerPoint summaries and can be reused or chained with others to form larger automations. Within Microsoft Foundry, every Skill is governed, tracible, and version-controlled, ensuring reliability across teams and projects.

These capabilities allow developers to create Skills that become reusable building blocks for intelligent automation. For example, instead of embedding complex logic in prompts, a Skill can teach Claude how to interact with a system, execute code, analyze data, or transform content and through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), those Skills can be invoked by any agent as part of a larger workflow. This makes it easier to standardize expertise, ensure consistency, and scale automation across teams and applications.

Custom Deep Research: Context that connects beyond a single prompt

Claude’s Deep Research capability extends model reasoning beyond static queries. It allows agents to gather information from live sources, compare it with internal enterprise data, and produce well-reasoned, source-grounded insights. This transforms agents from simple responders into analytical systems capable of synthesizing trends, evidence, and context at scale.

Pricing

Looking ahead

Our partnership with Anthropic is about more than just bringing new models to Foundry. It’s about empowering every person and organization to achieve more with AI. We look forward to seeing how developers and enterprises leverage these new capabilities to build the next generation of intelligent systems.

Ready to explore Claude in Foundry? Start building today and join us in shaping the next generation of intelligent agents. Tune in to Ignite for more exciting Microsoft Foundry announcements: register today.