What’s New in Azure AI Foundry – July 2025

Microsoft’s July 2025 Azure AI Foundry release delivers significant upgrades to models, agents, developer tools, and platform capabilities, making it easier to build, monitor, and scale AI solutions securely.

Key Highlights:

Models

  • GPT-image-1 now supports input fidelity for preserving style and features during image edits, and partial image streaming for early visual previews during generation.

Agents

  • Deep Research Agent (Public Preview) enables automated, multi-step web research using OpenAI’s o3-deep-research model with Bing Search for authoritative results.

Tools

  • AgentOps adds advanced tracing, evaluation, and monitoring for agents; AI Red Teaming Agent (Preview) now offers a cloud-based UI for reviewing security and compliance tests.

SDK Updates

  • Major updates to Python, .NET, Java, and JavaScript/TypeScript SDKs, including new agent features, improved evaluation tools, and some breaking changes in method names and APIs.

Fine-tuning & Evaluation

  • New public previews: RFT Observability (real-time monitoring of fine-tuning jobs), Quick Evals (fast output checks), Python Grader (custom evaluation logic). Developer Tier is now GA for 24-hour free model hosting to aid prototyping.

Platform & API Enhancements

  • MCP connections in public preview, Model Router and Leaderboard available via SDKs/APIs, reinforcement fine-tuning support for select models.

Documentation & Guidance

  • New Terraform deployment guide, Deep Research samples, updated model availability, new PII filtering docs, fine-tuning cost management guide, and increased file upload limits (300GB).