Claude on Microsoft Foundry now generally available on Azure

Enterprises can now build and deploy AI agents using Anthropic's Claude models through Microsoft Foundry on Azure, offering a simplified procurement process, Azure-native controls, and faster time to value for production AI projects. This integration addresses common enterprise AI project roadblocks such as procurement, governance, and networking, allowing teams to focus on building agentic applications.

The Foundry Agent Service uses Claude as its reasoning core to orchestrate complex, multi-step agents capable of planning, tool use, and task execution across enterprise systems. Features like model routing and agent optimization further enhance performance and user satisfaction.

Teams can integrate Claude into their existing Azure accounts, utilizing familiar authentication via Microsoft Entra ID, role-based access controls, governance policies, and Azure management experiences for billing and usage tracking. This ensures a secure and compliant environment for running AI workloads.

Customers can choose between Global and US data zones for inference processing to meet data residency requirements. For high-sensitivity workloads, zero data retention is available, ensuring prompts and completions are not retained by Anthropic after the API call.

Claude usage is billed through Claude Consumption Units (CCU), appearing as a single line item on the Azure bill, simplifying purchasing and consumption for commercial teams.

Claude models offer leading capabilities for tasks such as code generation, debugging, agentic workflows, multi-step reasoning, and complex decision support, connecting to the broader Azure ecosystem for enterprise-grade AI development.