Microsoft is opening up the GitHub Copilot agent harness to outside developers through Microsoft Foundry, bringing the same orchestration infrastructure used across its Copilot products into a managed service for building and deploying autonomous agents.
Announced Wednesday, the Microsoft Copilot harness is now available in public preview through Foundry Agent Service. It comes with built-in sandboxing, reusable skills, MCP integrations, and support for subagents. Microsoft takes care of running the agent and managing its execution environment, leaving developers to choose a supported model and configure the instructions and tools for their applications.
The same harness now supports Copilot Code, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, the CLI, and VS Code.
The company is also using GitHub’s agent infrastructure across more of its Copilot products. It’s a continuation of the Foundry strategy outlined at Build 2026, which focuses on making AI agents easier for companies to run, manage, and control. The same harness now supports Copilot Code, Copilot Studio, GitHub Copilot, the CLI, and VS Code.
Microsoft’s harness manages model and tool calls, tracks context, and keeps agents within configured policies. Skills can package instructions, scripts, and supporting resources, while MCP integrations require authentication and approval. Agents can also work with files, run code, and delegate tasks to subagents, with the main agent coordinating the results.
Microsoft’s harness manages model and tool calls, tracks context, and keeps agents within configured policies.
The company’s technical walkthrough shows how this works with a research agent. yaml file defines the model deployment, tools, instructions, and harness.
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