Foundry Model Router Expands from Two Regions to 28, Refreshing Its Model Pool

Microsoft expanded its Foundry Model Router from 2 to 28 global regions and updated its model pool, adding Anthropic Claude Opus 4.8 and GPT-5.6 while retiring older GPT-5 chat models. Default deployments receive updates automatically without redeployment, but teams using custom model subsets must manually update. The update affects model behavior and application outcomes despite stable API schemas.