Azure

The Foundry Models catalog page lists models sold and hosted by Azure under Azure OpenAI and other provider collections, including newly highlighted entries such as GPT-6 series (gpt-6-astra) and GPT-5.6 series (gpt-5.6-sol, gpt-5.6-terra, gpt-5.6-luna), alongside GPT-chat-latest preview, GPT-5.5, the GPT-5.4 family (g As a provider-focused catalog view, the listing carries potential news value about Azure's direct model portfolio, though it functions primarily as a reference/catalog page rather than a launch announcement. The research report flagged the GPT-6 entry as a possible error or hallucination on a Microsoft Learn page given

Microsoft's Foundry Models retirement schedule (updated five days before the current date) provides concrete deprecation and retirement dates for Azure-hosted OpenAI models, along with Microsoft-recommended replacements. Notable near-term items include gpt-4o (2024-05-13) retiring 2026-10-01 with gpt-5.1 as the suggest For the gpt-5 family, the schedule lists gpt-5, gpt-5-mini, and gpt-5-nano (all 2025-08-07) retiring 2027-02-09, while gpt-5-codex (2025-09-15) retires 2027-03-17, gpt-5-pro (2025-10-06) lists a 2027 date, and gpt-5-chat versions are already retired with gpt-chat-latest as replacement. The page is framed as a planning

Microsoft's Azure OpenAI "What's new" page (Foundry classic) details several new real-time and audio models now documented for Azure. The May 2026 section introduces GPT Realtime 2.0 (preview) concept articles covering reasoning support, response phases (preamble and final answer), and stricter instruction following, p The page also documents the February 2026 release of gpt-realtime-1.5 and gpt-audio-1.5, which Microsoft says build on the prior GPT-Realtime and GPT-Audio with improved instruction following, multilingual support, and tool calling, accessible via existing chat completion APIs in Microsoft Foundry. It additionally note

The Microsoft Foundry "What's New — June 2026" devblog post (published Jul 7, 2026) documents a broad set of Azure AI platform releases, headlined by Anthropic Claude reaching general availability on Azure with the Messages API, prompt caching, extended thinking, and tool streaming, plus integration as the reasoning co Toolboxes gain Skills, Work IQ, Fabric IQ, Browser Automation, and Tool Search (all preview), with Routines in preview for scheduled and triggered agent execution, and Agent Optimizer entering private preview as a closed-loop evaluate-generate-rank-deploy workflow. Memory adds procedural memory, management experiences,

Microsoft Foundry now supports Claude Fable 5, unlocking advanced agent capabilities for long-running tasks, enterprise workflows, and AI-driven productivity.

OpenAI is gradually shedding one of its key early partners as it looks toward going public.

Microsoft this week announced that its Azure OpenAI service has reached the "general availability" commercial-release stage.

The Azure China docs "What's New" page for Azure AI Search documents the 2026-04-01 stable REST API with multiple GA features: search index knowledge sources, blob knowledge sources, web knowledge sources, index aliases, knowledge source status, Azure Content Understanding skill, and Markdown one-to-one and one-to-many Additional 2026-04-01 GA items include user-assigned managed identity for indexer connections, knowledge store connections, and customer-managed encryption key access to Azure Key Vault. Split billing consent for semantic ranker and agentic retrieval is now independent, with all search services automatically on the fre