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On June 29, 2026, we announced the general availability of Claude in Microsoft Foundry, giving enterprises a production-ready path to build with Claude models in the Azure ecosystem. Today, we’re continuing that momentum with the general availability of Claude Sonnet 5 in Microsoft Foundry. Claude Sonnet 5 brings Anthropic’s most capable Sonnet model to Microsoft Foundry, where developers can use it with Foundry Agent Service and Microsoft IQ to build, ground, evaluate, and scale Agentic applications.  Sonnet 5 raises the standard for the everyday model teams rely on, delivering top-tier intelligence for coding, agents, and professional work at scale. Built as an upgrade to Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5 helps teams improve quality and reliability across engineering, agentic workflows, and knowledge work.  

Organizations can now build with Sonnet 5 through their existing Azure account, using Azure-native authentication, billing, networking, governance, and data controls. Hosted on Azure, inference is processed in Azure, customers can choose between Global and US data zones, and Anthropic operates inference as the data processor and SLA provider. This gives enterprises a trusted path to adopt Claude Sonnet 5 for production AI while staying within the Azure environment their teams already rely on. 

Built for real engineering work  

Sonnet 5 is designed for the complexity of modern software development. It can navigate large codebases, reason across many files, and carry longer debugging, refactoring, and implementation tasks through to completion.  

For developers, Sonnet 5 can help with:  

• Understanding unfamiliar codebases  


• Planning and landing multi-file changes  


• Debugging issues across services or components  


• Refactoring code while preserving behavior  


• Writing cleaner, more maintainable code  


• Reducing the number of correction rounds needed   

For teams building developer tools, coding agents, migration assistants, or internal engineering copilots, Sonnet 5 provides a stronger foundation for moving from task description to working code. 

A more reliable backbone for agents  
As enterprises move from chat-based assistants to agents that can plan, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks, reliability becomes critical. Agents need to call the right tools, maintain state, recover from errors, and know when to check their own work. Sonnet 5 is built to serve as a more dependable backbone for production agents. It calls tools more precisely, holding context across many steps, and recovering when something goes wrong without losing the thread. It can also check its own work along the way, helping more multi-step runs finish correctly the first time.  
This makes Sonnet 5 especially relevant for workflows such as:  

• Workflow automation  


• Browser and desktop automation  


• Research and analysis agents  


• Reporting agents  


• Code generation and review agents  


• Tool-using assistants that operate across enterprise systems  

Stronger support for everyday professional work  
Sonnet 5 is not only built for developers. It is also designed for the work that fills a professional’s day: analyzing information, drafting documents, building spreadsheets, creating slides, and turning unstructured source material into clear outputs. Sonnet 5 can help teams build and audit spreadsheets, draft slides and documents, summarize and structure source material, perform financial analysis, create reports, review numbers and assumptions, and produce cleaner first drafts that are closer to ready to use. Because Sonnet 5 works incrementally and checks its own steps, it can improve reliability on tasks where precision matters.  
 
Why use Sonnet 5 in Foundry?

Microsoft Foundry gives developers a trusted platform to discover, evaluate, deploy, and operate leading AI models for production applications. With Sonnet 5 generally available in Foundry, teams can access Anthropic’s latest Sonnet-class model in the Azure ecosystem, with the enterprise controls they need to build AI applications at scale. For teams building agents, Foundry Agent Service can use Sonnet 5 as the reasoning core to orchestrate multi-step planning, tool use, and task execution across enterprise systems. 

With Microsoft Foundry, teams can: 

• Explore and compare models for their workload 


• Evaluate model behavior using their own data and success criteria 


• Build agentic applications with tool use and orchestration 


• Monitor quality, safety, and performance 


• Deploy with enterprise-grade security and governance 


• Optimize across quality, latency, and cost as model options evolve 

For enterprises, this means Sonnet 5 is not just a powerful model. It is part of a broader development lifecycle that helps teams build, evaluate, operate, and continuously improve AI systems in production. Organizations can authenticate with Microsoft Entra ID, apply Azure role-based access controls, manage access through existing governance policies, and track usage through familiar Azure management experiences. For high-sensitivity workloads, zero data retention is also available, so prompts and completions are not retained by Anthropic after the API call completes. 

For commercial teams, Claude usage is billed in Claude Consumption Units as a consolidated line on the Azure bill, with MACC drawdown and per-model detail in Foundry unchanged. That simplifies how teams procure, consume, govern, and scale Claude in the same cloud environment where they already operate. 

Pricing

* According to Anthropic, this promotional launch pricing of $2/$10 per million input/output tokens is in effect through August 31, 2026, after which the standard pricing of $3/$15 per million input/output tokens will take effect.

Getting started 

Claude Sonnet 5 is now generally available in Microsoft Foundry for developers and enterprises building AI applications on Azure. Customers using Sonnet 4.6 can evaluate Sonnet 5 by testing it against their own prompts, datasets, tools, and application workflows. We recommend starting with the workloads where quality, reliability, and completion rate matter most: coding agents, multi-step tool-using agents, spreadsheets and document workflows, and professional analysis tasks. As models continue to evolve, Microsoft Foundry helps teams adopt new capabilities with confidence by giving them the tools to evaluate what changed, measure the impact, and deploy the right model for the right workload. 

Sonnet 5 brings top-tier intelligence to the Sonnet model class, making it easier for enterprises to scale more capable coding, agentic, and professional workflows on Azure. Try Sonnet 5 in Foundry today.