Introduction
Welcome! In this module, we'll take you from "I have heard of Claude" to "I just made my first request to Claude on Microsoft Foundry."
Microsoft has been building AI into the platform for over a decade. Microsoft Foundry is Microsoft's AI app and agent factory; and Anthropic's Claude models are now native options inside Foundry, bringing powerful AI capabilities directly into your development workflow.
Note
Claude's integration extends far beyond Foundry. You'll find Claude models throughout the Microsoft AI ecosystem; including in Microsoft 365 Copilot Studio and GitHub Copilot.
What is Claude?
Claude is Anthropic's family of frontier models designed for sophisticated AI tasks. Claude excels at:
- Complex reasoning - Working through multi-step problems with careful analysis
- Code generation and review - Writing and evaluating code across multiple languages
- Long document processing - Understanding and working with extensive text documents
- Agentic workflows - Powering autonomous agents that take a goal and work through it step by step
Claude on Microsoft Foundry
When you use Claude on Microsoft Foundry, you get the same Claude that Anthropic ships everywhere:
- The same models with consistent performance and capabilities
- The same Messages API for familiar integration patterns
- The same SDKs across multiple programming languages
All of this runs inside your Azure tenant, giving you the benefits of:
- Unified invoicing and cost management
- Integrated authentication and authorization
- Comprehensive observability and diagnostics
Let's get started building with Claude on Microsoft Foundry!
Note
We recognize that different people like to learn in different ways. You can choose to complete this module in video-based format or you can read the content as text and images. The text contains greater detail than the videos, so in some cases you might want to refer to it as supplemental material to the video presentation.