Claude now available in Microsoft Foundry and Microsoft 365 Copilot (www.anthropic.com)

Anthropic’s Claude models (Sonnet 4.5, Haiku 4.5, Opus 4.1) are now in public preview inside Microsoft Foundry and expanded across Microsoft 365 Copilot—bringing production-ready Claude capabilities directly into the Microsoft ecosystem. The move lets enterprises deploy Claude via Foundry’s serverless platform (Anthropic-managed infrastructure) using existing Azure agreements and billing (MACC eligible), removing separate procurement and billing overhead. Claude also powers Copilot’s Researcher agent for complex, multistep research and is available in Copilot Studio for custom agents; Excel’s Agent Mode now supports a Claude preview that can generate formulas, analyze data, find errors, and iterate on spreadsheets. Technically, Foundry access includes Python, TypeScript, and C# SDKs with Microsoft Entra authentication, standard API pricing in a Global Standard rollout (US DataZone coming soon), and support for Developer Platform features like code execution, web search/fetch, citations, vision, tool use, and prompt caching. Model guidance: Sonnet 4.5 is positioned as the top coding and advanced-agent model for sophisticated reasoning and autonomous coding; Haiku 4.5 prioritizes speed and cost-efficiency (near-frontier performance at ~1/3 the cost) for high-volume real-time tasks; Opus 4.1 targets specialized, sustained-reasoning workloads. This integration accelerates enterprise adoption of advanced LLMs inside familiar tooling, streamlining agent and automation workflows across dev and office scenarios.