Microsoft Launches Production-Ready AI Agent Harness and Hosted Agents at Build 2026
Microsoft announced the General Availability of Agent Harness and Foundry Hosted Agents at its Build 2026 conference, marking a shift from experimental tooling to a fully supported production runtime. Agent Harness is a single binary handling the operational core of AI agents, including function invocation, context compaction, history persistence, tool approval, and built-in OpenTelemetry observability. Foundry Hosted Agents offers the same capabilities as a managed, consumption-based cloud service accessible via a single API call. Both products run locally, in containers, or as a hosted service, and support multi-agent orchestration with connectors for GitHub Copilot and the Claude Agent SDK. The release addresses longstanding production challenges teams faced when deploying AI agents, positioning the infrastructure layer — not the AI model itself — as the core product.
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