Microsoft brings GPT-5 and GPT OSS to AI Toolkit for VS Code

Microsoft has rolled out AI Toolkit v0.18.3 for Visual Studio Code. It brings full integration of OpenAI’s GPT-5 family of models and the new GPT OSS open-source models.

Developers can now access the latest GPT-5 lineup directly through GitHub, Azure AI Foundry, or OpenAI, with options tailored for different needs. The flagship GPT-5 model focuses on advanced reasoning for analytics, orchestration, and code generation.

GPT-5-mini offers lower cost and latency for real-time tools, while gpt-5-nano is optimized for speed and concise reasoning. There’s also a preview of gpt-5-chat, designed for natural, multimodal, multi-turn conversations with persistent context, ideal for building agent-driven apps.

The update also marks the debut of OpenAI’s GPT OSS within the toolkit, providing developers with open-source options that can run in the cloud or locally.

The gpt-oss-120b model is available via Azure AI Foundry for large-scale deployments, featuring adjustable reasoning effort and structured output support. For edge or Windows setups, gpt-oss-20b-cuda-gpu offers CUDA-optimized local inference with performance-boosting RTN quantization.

AI Toolkit now makes it easier to compare models side-by-side, generate ready-to-run SDK snippets in Python or JavaScript, and deploy to different environments — whether cloud, local, closed-source, or open-source.

With this release, Microsoft is positioning the AI Toolkit as a flexible hub for experimenting with and integrating both cutting-edge and open-source AI models. It will help streamline development from prototype to production.