Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Anthropic to integrate Anthropic’s state-of-the-art Claude models into Microsoft Foundry, making it possible for Azure customers to access frontier intelligence in a single, governed, scalable environment.
With this collaboration, Microsoft Foundry which already supports a broad range of models is now uniquely positioned as the only cloud platform that offers access to both Claude and GPT frontier models. According to Microsoft, this enables developers and enterprises to pick the intelligence best suited to their use cases, all within the same secure infrastructure.
Claude Models Now Available in Foundry
Under the partnership, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Claude Opus 4.1 are now publicly available in Microsoft Foundry, enabling developers to build production applications and intelligent agents on Azure.
These Claude models are designed for enterprise workloads, with deep reasoning, multi-document research, and strong integration with productivity tools. They can be deployed via Foundry with governance, observability, and rapid integration, making them well-suited for use cases such as customer-support agents, coding assistants, and research copilots.
A comparative overview of the three models highlights their strengths and ideal use cases:
| Model | Strengths | Ideal Use Cases |
| Claude Haiku 4.5 | Fastest, cost-efficient | Free-tier experiences, real-time agents, coding sub-agents, business tasks |
| Claude Sonnet 4.5 | Highly capable, best for complex reasoning | Long-running agents, cybersecurity, financial analysis, research, coding |
| Claude Opus 4.1 | Specialized reasoning | Advanced coding, long-horizon tasks, agentic search, content creation |
All Claude models are built on Constitutional AI for safety, and through Foundry they benefit from enterprise-grade governance and observability.
Enabling Agent-Driven Workflows, At Scale
Microsoft explained that Claude will act as the reasoning core within its Foundry Agent Service, powering multi-step, goal-driven workflows.
Key capabilities include:
- Planning complex, multi-stage tasks with structured reasoning and long-context understanding.
- Integrating with business systems and pipelines using the Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing Claude to invoke external APIs, fetchers, and data stores.
- Automating document operations, such as summarization, classification, or insights extraction.
- Real-time model routing: via the Foundry model router, requests can be dynamically directed to Opus, Sonnet, or Haiku, optimizing for latency and cost.
- Unified governance: Foundry offers controls over an agent fleet, with visibility into cost, performance, and behavior from a single pane.
Developers can also build with Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding agent, within Foundry.
Also Read: Builder.io Launches Fusion 1.0 – the First AI Agent Empowering Product, Design & Code Workflows
Modular Intelligence with Claude Skills
Anthropic’s Claude API lets developers create Skills modular building blocks combining natural-language instructions, optional Python or Bash code, and data (templates, APIs, or files).
In Microsoft Foundry, these Skills are:
- Discovered dynamically by agents, maximizing context.
- Governed, versioned, and traceable, ensuring reliability across enterprise teams.
Using Skills, developers can encapsulate logic (for example, how to interact with a system or extract data), making workflows reusable, consistent, and scalable.
Deep Research Capabilities
One of the standout features is Deep Research, which allows Claude-powered agents to:
- Gather data from live external sources.
- Reconcile it with internal enterprise data.
- Produce well-reasoned, source-grounded insights.
This transforms agents from simple responders into analytical systems capable of synthesizing trends, evidence, and context at scale.
Customer Perspectives
Microsoft and Anthropic highlighted early customer reactions: “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
“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
Strategic Rationale & Outlook
According to Microsoft, the integration of Claude models into Foundry represents a significant milestone in its broader AI strategy:
- Model choice as a driver of innovation: By offering both Claude and GPT frontier models, Azure enables enterprises to select intelligence tailored to specific workloads — from real-time chat to multi-step research.
- Operationalization at scale: The combination of Foundry’s governance, security, and observability with Claude’s reasoning capabilities addresses a key barrier to scaling AI across enterprise processes.
- Responsible AI by design: Foundry’s unified controls and oversight mechanisms ensure teams can deploy powerful agents without compromising on safety or compliance.
