Microsoft Foundry Agent Service Reaches GA: Private VNet, Voice Live, MCP OAuth Passthrough, and Enterprise Evaluations Ship Together

Microsoft Foundry Blog·high signal

Microsoft's next-generation Azure Foundry Agent Service reached general availability on March 16, 2026, distinct from the AutoGen + Semantic Kernel merger (Microsoft Agent Framework). GA features include bring-your-own VNet private networking extended to MCP servers and Azure AI Search with no public egress, Voice Live real-time speech-to-speech in preview, MCP authentication covering key, Entra Agent Identity, Managed Identity, and OAuth Identity Passthrough in a single service, and evaluations GA with continuous Azure Monitor integration. The runtime is wire-compatible with OpenAI Agents SDK and supports open models from Meta, Mistral, DeepSeek, and xAI.