What’s new today GPT‑5. 6 is generally available in Microsoft Foundry, alongside the Asia-Pacific Data Zone, and hosted agents in Foundry Agent Service. AI only creates value when it shows up in real systems—systems that are reliable, observable, and aligned to business outcomes.
More than 100,000 organizations are already building on Microsoft Foundry , and companies like Adobe, Telefónica, and Tata Consultancy Services are running agents in production today. At Microsoft Build, we laid out a simple promise for the agentic era: developers should be able to build an agent where they already work, run it on infrastructure they can trust, and put it in front of the people who need it— without stitching together disconnected platforms.
Today, that vision moves from roadmap to reality with three sets of updates now generally available in Microsoft Foundry: OpenAI’s latest frontier model series : GPT-5. 6 Sol, GPT-5. 6 Terra, and GPT-5.
6—each tuned to a different workload, available in Standard Global and Standard Data Zones. Asia-Pacific Data Zone , giving APAC customers a regional option to run frontier OpenAI models while keeping data processing within the region. Production agents in Foundry Agent Service, with hosted agents , toolboxes , and publishing to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams .
Together, these capabilities bring frontier models, production agent runtime, enterprise-grade identity, security, and compliance controls, and distribution across Microsoft 365 into a single platform—helping organizations move from experimentation to production without assembling disconnected tools and services. Why Foundry is the best agent platform Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft’s end-to-end platform for building, running, governing, and distributing AI agents.
Foundry brings together the capabilities organizations need to move agents into production across three pillars: Build : Open and flexible across models and frameworks. Generate : Connected to enterprise data, tools, and users. Govern : Secured, managed, and optimized for long-term value.
These pillars come together in the latest Foundry updates, helping organizations build, run, and scale production agents on a single platform. Build with any framework and model on the industry’s end-to-end AI platform Agent development starts where developers already work—in GitHub Copilot and Microsoft Visual Studio (VS) Code—with the Foundry Toolkit for VS Code and the Foundry skill handling deployment to Foundry.
Whether teams build with Microsoft Agent Framework , GitHub Copilot SDK (generally available), or Claude Agent SDK, Foundry is the production destination—and it all starts with the right model. Start with the right model for the right job An agent is only as capable as the model reasoning behind it. Microsoft Foundry gives organizations access to industry-leading frontier, open-source, and task-specific models through a single platform, allowing teams to choose the right model for every workload.
Today, we’re making OpenAI’s GPT-5. 6 series generally available in Microsoft Foundry Models and Microsoft Foundry Agent Service: GPT-5. 6 Sol delivers the most advanced reasoning capabilities yet, supporting extended reasoning, agentic workflows, and code-focused scenarios, for the most demanding enterprise workloads.
GPT-5. 6 Terra is a balanced model for everyday work, delivering performance competitive with GPT-5. 5 at a lower cost, making it ideal for scaling intelligent applications across the enterprise.
GPT-5. 6 Luna is the fastest and most affordable model in the family, making it well suited to high-volume, latency-sensitive workloads. Together, the GPT-5.
6 series gives organizations the flexibility to match model capability, cost, and performance requirements to specific business scenarios, rather than forcing every workload onto a single model. Customers consistently tell us that access to new models matters as much as model quality. That’s why we are making GPT-5.
6 available through Global Standard and Global Priority Processing for all the existing 28 global regions, Data Zones Standard, and Global Provisioned from day one . This enables customers to adopt the latest frontier AI innovations where they have already built, deployed, and scaled their applications. GPT 5.
6 pricing Model Deployment Pricing (USD $/million tokens) Input Output GPT-5. 6 Sol Standard Global 5. 00 30.
00 GPT-5. 6 Terra Standard Global 2. 50 15.
00 GPT-5. 6 Luna Standard Global 1. 00 6.
00 Run frontier AI where your business operates More models, in more regions, are only half of what platform expansion means. The other half is more places to run them compliantly. This is exactly what the Asia-Pacific Data Zone delivers.
Today we’re also announcing the general availability of the Asia-Pacific (APAC) Data Zone for Microsoft Foundry , enabling APAC customers to run frontier OpenAI models while keeping data processing within the Asia-Pacific regions, with no separate environment to stitch together and no waiting for capability to catch up. With Global, Data Zone, and Regional deployment options available in Foundry, organizations can align AI adoption with their sovereignty, compliance, performance, and scale requirements while maintaining a consistent development and operations experience across environments.
As financial institutions adopt AI, responsible data handling becomes foundational to trust. Microsoft Foundry’s APAC Data Zone allows us to keep data processing regionally anchored while accessing advanced AI models at scale. This gives us the confidence to accelerate AI innovation responsibly and reinforces our ambition to be a leading AI-powered financial platform in Asia.
—Hongsoo Kim, Chief Data and AI Officer (CDAO), Viva Republica (Toss) Generate impact with action-oriented, context aware agents A capable model is only the starting point.
Originally published at azure.microsoft.com
