Anthropic's Claude models have officially graduated from preview to general availability inside Microsoft Foundry, the company's unified AI development platform on Azure. The move is more than a label change: it introduces a new hosting mode that runs inference on Azure infrastructure operated by Anthropic, adds a US data zone for teams with residency requirements, and lets enterprise customers pay for Claude directly out of their existing Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment budgets.
What just shipped
Two models are available at launch in the GA tier: Claude Opus 4.8, Anthropic's most capable generally available model for coding and agentic workflows, and Claude Haiku 4.5, the lightweight, cost-efficient option. Both are accessible through the Messages API and ship with prompt caching and extended thinking (Anthropic's term for giving the model extra compute time to reason through hard problems before responding) enabled from day one.
The official announcement introduces a two-mode architecture worth understanding:
- Hosted on Azure (new): Inference runs on Azure infrastructure, operated by Anthropic as the data processor. You get Azure authentication via Microsoft Entra ID, consolidated Azure billing, and access to a US data zone for data residency requirements.
- Hosted on Anthropic (formerly the Foundry Preview): Routes to Anthropic's own infrastructure. Gives you access to the full API feature set and models not yet available on the Azure-hosted path.
Anthropic says the goal is eventual feature and model parity between the two modes. For now, if you need a model or feature that's only on the Anthropic-hosted path, you can switch without leaving the Foundry environment.
The billing detail that matters most to enterprises
The headline technical feature is the hosting mode, but the headline procurement feature is MACC eligibility. MACC, or Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, is the pre-negotiated cloud spend budget that large enterprises lock in through Enterprise Agreements with Microsoft, typically spanning one to three years. Claude usage can now draw down that pre-committed Azure budget, which for a Fortune 500 buyer is the difference between a six-week vendor approval process and a one-click add to an existing contract.
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