What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | Dec 2025 & Jan 2026

[amynic]

> Author’s note: So.. it has been a bit. I have to level with you — I returned from paternity leave in January and between Microsoft Ignite 2025 and present day, things have changed a lot. Without further adieu, here is your monthly (late) drop for all things new with Microsoft Foundry. Expect following editions to be back on track going forward. Thanks for your patience!

Thank you @nicholasdbrady for the developer gold mine of releases from Foundry - excited to have this post back!

Full Blog here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/foundry/whats-new-in-microsoft-foundry-dec-2025-jan-2026/

TL;DR
December 2025 was one of the biggest months in Microsoft Foundry history. Here’s everything that shipped:

• GPT‑5.2 (GA): New enterprise reasoning standard — top benchmark scores across math, science, coding, and multimodal tasks; available as gpt-5.2 and gpt-5.2-chat-latest.
• GPT‑5.1 Codex Max (GA): 77.9% on SWE-Bench, 400K context, 50+ languages — built for autonomous multi-agent coding pipelines, PR generation, and CI/CD integration.
• Mistral Large 3 (Public Preview): Apache 2.0, 41B active / 675B total parameters; $0.50 / $1.50 per million tokens. Strong instruction following and multimodal reasoning.
• DeepSeek V3.2 + V3.2‑Speciale (Public Preview): 128K context, up to 3× faster reasoning via Sparse Attention; Speciale drops tool calling entirely for maximum reasoning accuracy.
• Kimi‑K2 Thinking (Public Preview): Moonshot AI’s deep reasoning model with a 256K context window, now Direct from Azure.
• Cohere Rerank 4 (Fast + Pro): Cross-encoding reranker for RAG pipelines; 100+ languages, serverless pay-as-you-go.
• GPT‑image‑1.5 (GA): 4× faster generation, ~20% lower cost vs. GPT‑image‑1; adds inpainting and face preservation.
• FLUX.2 [pro] (Public Preview): Black Forest Labs’ next-gen image model with multi-reference support, improved text rendering, and enterprise SLAs on Azure.
• Audio models (GA, Dec 15): Realtime Mini, ASR (gpt-4o-mini-transcribe), and TTS (gpt-4o-mini-tts) — all GA with significant accuracy and latency improvements.
• Fine-tuning base models: Ministral 3B, Qwen3 32B, OSS-20B, and Llama 3.3 70B now available for serverless fine-tuning.
• ⚠️ AzureML SDK v1 EOL: June 30, 2026 — migrate to SDK v2 now; CLI v1 already sunset September 2025.
• azure-ai-projects v2 beta: Agents, inference, evaluations, and memory are now unified in a single package — the azure-ai-agents dependency is gone; 2.0.0b3 shipped January 6, 2026.
• Memory in Foundry Agent Service (Public Preview): Managed long-term memory store with automatic extraction, consolidation, and retrieval across agent sessions. Free during preview; pay only for the underlying model calls.
• Agent-to-Agent (A2A) Tool (Preview): Let Foundry agents call any A2A-protocol endpoint with explicit auth and clean call/response semantics — the structured evolution of Connected Agents.
• Foundry MCP Server (Preview): Cloud-hosted MCP at mcp.ai.azure.com, live since December 3. Connect from VS Code, Visual Studio, or the Foundry portal — zero local process management, Entra auth included.
• Microsoft Foundry for VS Code — January 2026: Multi-workflow visualizer, all prompt agents testable in Playground, and code samples for every agent type.

[amynic]

What's your favourite release in this period?

[nicholasdbrady]

Thank you for sharing, @amynic!