Foundry Labs @ Build 2026

We launched Foundry Labs last year as the home for cutting-edge AI experiments from across Microsoft. It is meant to be a place where developers could try, fork, and build with our earliest prototypes. The response from the community has been tremendous, and we're doubling down. Today at Build 2026, we're rolling out a refreshed experience for Foundry Labs. Here's what's new.

A refreshed home for Microsoft’s AI experiments

We’ve rebuilt labs.ai.azure.com as a central hub for every AI experiment coming out of Microsoft. The catalog is now searchable and easier to scan whether you’re hunting for a specific model or just curious about what’s shipping next.

One theme we heard loud and clear from developers: more connection to the community. So, we added two new sections that put that front and center:

• Stories — a dedicated space for the stories from the teams who are building real systems with experiments from Foundry Labs. The first stories are live, and we're always looking for more — if you're building with Foundry Labs, we'd love to hear from you.
• Communities — a page for the places where our team and our developer community gather. The current calendar includes Microsoft events as well as conferences we'll be attending and sponsoring. If you're going to be at any of them, come find us!

Over the past year, we’ve watched the same pattern repeat: AI breaking out of demos and into the hands of builders, in six specific domains. We’ve reorganized Foundry Labs around those six areas, so you can navigate by the problem you’re solving for:

• Biomedical Sciences — accelerating pathology, drug discovery, and clinical research with multimodal AI (ex. GigaTIME, RosettaFold3)
• Chemistry & Materials — generating and screening new compounds before they ever exist in a lab (ex. MatterGen, Skala, RetroChimera)
• Code & Software Engineering — debugging, refactoring, and reasoning about codebases at agentic scale (ex. BugPilot, Debug-gym)
• Creative & Generative Media — text-to-image, voice, and 3D generation with enterprise-grade control (ex. MAI-Image-2, MAI-Voice-1, Trellis)
• Geospatial & Earth Science — turning petabytes of satellite and overhead imagery into usable signal (ex. EO/OS Object Detection). This was developed in collaboration with the Microsoft Planetary Computer team.
• Robotics & Physical AI — translating language into action for embodied systems (ex. Rho-Alpha)

We’re also rolling out these categories into Microsoft Foundry Model Catalog, making it easier for you to find and choose models specific to your use case.

We're continuing the momentum of frontier-quality, cost-efficient models from Microsoft AI (MAI) with the availability of new releases across 4 modalities:

• Text/Reasoning: MAI-Thinking-1 is our first large language model, designed to deliver strong reasoning, math, and general intelligence at a fraction of the cost of frontier-scale models.
• Image: MAI-Image-2.5 is an updated image generation model that adds image-to-image editing and a suite of "control with preservation" capabilities, once again debuting at No. 3 on Arena.ai for image generation model families. We also have MAI-Image-2.5 Flash for a faster and more efficient option.
• Voice: MAI-Voice-2 is an updated multilingual text-to-speech model that brings voice cloning and voice prompting to more than 10 languages. We also have MAI-Voice-2 Flash for a faster and more efficient option coming soon.
• Speech: MAI-Transcribe-1.5 is an updated speech-to-text model that adds content biasing and improved accuracy.

These are the same models already powering experiences across Copilot, Bing, OneDrive, PowerPoint, and Azure Speech, and now they're available in Foundry for developers to build with.

Learn more about the new MAI models in Foundry here.

If you are at Build 2026, two sessions are especially relevant if you want to dig deeper into AI experiments from Microsoft in Foundry Labs:

• BRK230 — Build smarter AI systems in Foundry as models and costs evolve. How to quickly choose, integrate, and validate AI models inside Microsoft Foundry: navigating thousands of model options, benchmarking performance, and streamlining the workflow with deep IDE support.
• LTG419 — Turn ideas into AI applications with Microsoft Foundry Labs. A lightning talk covering the new Foundry Labs website with interactive demos of the latest releases from Microsoft Research. On-site only in San Francisco.

Come find us in the expo hall – we’d love to connect!

Foundry Labs is where Microsoft’s most ambitious AI research becomes accessible to builders. Whether you’re forecasting hurricanes, building voice agents, designing molecules, or shipping multimodal pipelines — the tools are here, and the next wave is already in the lab.

Stay tuned — there’s more coming soon:

• Explore more AI innovations on https://labs.ai.azure.com/
• Join the Microsoft Foundry Discord community to shape the future of AI together