Azure Updates: Claude; Microsoft Foundry; Agent Confidence Index; PostgreSQL

Claude capabilities experienced mixed fortunes throughout June. Anthropic was forced to pull its Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 models from the market in response to a US national security restriction. After an 18 day gap, Anthropic was able to restore access to its models. 

In the midst of reporting on Claude capabilities, Microsoft Azure Product Lead Steve Sweetman highlighted the general availability of standard Claude models in Microsoft Foundry. Enterprise customers are able to build with Claude using their existing Azure accounts, relying on the same billing, governance, networking, and data controls their teams are already familiar with. 

Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Anthropic announced a strategic partnership in November 2025. Claude runs on NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems, using InfiniBand networking for inferencing. According to Sweetman, developers can access Claude through the Messages API, using core capabilities like prompt caching, tool streaming, and extended thinking. Foundry Agent Service uses Claude for reasoning. Inference is processed through Azure. Customers have options to use US or Global data zones. He noted that Foundry supports zero data retention so that prompts and completion are not kept by Anthropic after API calls go through.

CVP of Microsoft 365 Core, Amanda Silver, looked into the 2026 Agent Confidence Index. The recent survey profiled 300 technical experts across AI, cloud, and data to rank confidence across 101 different tasks. Some tasks like automated report generation, boilerplate code generation, and certificate expiration monitoring have high confidence ratings. By contrast, database schema migration and service mesh configuration rate low for overall confidence.