Foundry gives Claude five agent building blocks

Microsoft Foundry now exposes five agent-building capabilities—structured outputs, web search, web fetch, an MCP connector, and tool search—for Claude models hosted on Azure. Microsoft’s Foundry announcement says tool search can cut tool-definition context by over 85% and addresses selection problems once agents have roughly 30–50 tools. Teams building regulated agents can keep inference in an Azure deployment while replacing some bespoke scaffolding, but should test beta MCP behavior, data-handling boundaries, and tool allowlists before treating the bundle as a production control plane; that complements the archive’s analysis of Snowflake’s agent gateway.