What's New in Microsoft Foundry — February 2026

[nicholasdbrady]

The February digest is live — here's everything that shipped.

Models

• Claude Opus 4.6 & Sonnet 4.6 — Anthropic's frontier models with 1M-token context (beta), 128K output, adaptive thinking, and context compaction. Opus for deep reasoning, Sonnet for cost-efficient scale.
• GPT-Realtime-1.5 & GPT-Audio-1.5 — next-gen audio models with improved instruction following, multilingual support, and transcription accuracy.
• Grok 4.0 (GA) — first xAI model to reach GA in Foundry. Grok 4.1 Fast (preview) at $0.20/M input tokens for high-throughput workloads.
• FLUX.2 Flex — text-heavy image generation for UI prototyping and typography at $0.05/megapixel.
• Model Router — now supports GPT-5 series models.

Agents

• Microsoft Agent Framework 1.0.0rc1 — Release Candidate. API surface is locked. Significant breaking changes: credentials unified under Azure Identity, threads → sessions, response access via messages, exception and factory renames. Migration guide.
• Durable Agent Orchestration — new HITL pattern using Azure Durable Functions + Agent Framework + SignalR. Agents can pause indefinitely for human approval and survive restarts.

Platform & APIs

• Foundry REST API v1 is GA — core endpoints (chat completions, responses, embeddings, files, fine-tuning, models, vector stores) are production-ready with GA SLAs.
• Foundry Local — large multimodal models now run in fully disconnected sovereign environments.
• AI Toolkit for VS Code v0.30.0 — Tool Catalog, Agent Inspector with F5 debugging, redesigned Agent Builder.

SDKs (all targeting v1 REST surface)

Language	Package	Version
Python	azure-ai-projects	2.0.0b4
.NET	Azure.AI.Projects	2.0.0-beta.1
JS/TS	@azure/ai-projects	2.0.0-beta.4
Java	azure-ai-projects	2.0.0-beta.1
Agent Framework	agent-framework-core	1.0.0rc1

⚠️ All SDKs ship breaking changes — tool class renames, credential updates, and preview feature opt-in flags. These renames are final and will carry through to GA.

SDK GA announcements are imminent. Upgrade to the latest pre-release now.

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📖 Full post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/whats-new-in-microsoft-foundry-feb-2026/

Questions or feedback? Drop them below 👇