Microsoft Research has released Orchard, an open-source framework designed to make agentic AI research more scalable and reproducible. At its core is Orchard Env, a reusable Kubernetes-native environment service that supports training, reinforcement learning, trajectory distillation, and evaluation across multiple task domains without rebuilding infrastructure.
The framework includes reference implementations for software engineering, browser navigation, and personal assistant workflows, along with open datasets and training recipes.
Microsoft says Orchard enables researchers to compare agent designs more consistently while reducing infrastructure complexity, helping advance open research into autonomous AI systems capable of planning, reasoning, tool use, and long-horizon task execution.
