Microsoft
The third major agent-platform vendor in this wiki (after anthropic and google), entering via agents-that-build-agents-ms. Microsoft’s agent stack has two named layers:
- Microsoft Foundry — the “AI app and agent factory”: a unified Azure platform to build, ground, and govern AI apps and agents, with shared observability and policy across every agent. Components include Foundry Agent Service (a managed build/deploy/scale platform — any framework, any catalog model, a single Responses API entry point), Foundry IQ (the evolution of Azure AI Search, for grounding), Foundry Tools/Toolboxes, a VS Code Foundry Toolkit (create/test/debug/ deploy agents in-editor), and a control plane for governance. Ships multi-agent orchestration and Agent-to-Agent (A2A) APIs (a2a-protocol), with support for Semantic Kernel / AutoGen / CrewAI.
- Microsoft Agent Framework — the open-source SDK for creating, orchestrating, and extending agents; the builder-side layer beneath Foundry.
It adopts the open skills standard. Resolving the spoke’s former open question: per
agents-that-build-agents-ms (confirmed via Microsoft Learn), Foundry skills follow the
agentskills.io specification — SKILL.md + progressive disclosure, surfaced to
any MCP client as MCP Resources (SEP-2640) — plus a versioned Skills REST API. So Microsoft lands on
the same open format as Anthropic and Google, wired to MCP: convergence,
not a proprietary fork.
Two agent plays: (1) the builder side — Agent Framework + Foundry (agents-that-build-agents-ms); (2) the consumer/enterprise-assistant microsoft-scout — built on the OpenClaw framework, a self-driven durable assistant shipped with a “policy conformance” governance audit.
Relevance to the thesis: three independent vendors (anthropic, google, Microsoft) converge on agent-skills as the primitive, agent frameworks as the packaging, and the open agentskills-spec + MCP as the shared substrate — strong evidence the form factor is an industry attractor, and that the standard is unifying rather than fragmenting.
Related
agents-that-build-agents-ms · agent-skills · agentskills-spec · model-context-protocol · a2a-protocol · microsoft-scout · anthropic · google