Microsoft Research open-sources Orchard: an environment framework for scalable agent training and evaluation

Microsoft Research released the open-source framework Orchard, whose core is Orchard Env, a reusable environment service based on Kubernetes for training and evaluating agents across task domains, and it supports training directly in real deployment harnesses such as Codex, OpenClaw, and ZeroClaw. The team also released three training recipes: Orchard-SWE reaches 69.7% on SWE-bench Verified, and 73.0% with value-model reranking, with a model of about 3B activated parameters; Orchard-GUI uses a 4B vision-language model and averages 68.4% on WebVoyager, Online-Mind2Web, and DeepShop; Orchard-Claw is trained on only 200 synthetic tasks and completes 59.6% within three attempts on Claw-Eval, rising to 73.9% when paired with ZeroClaw. The project also open-sourced the training data and evaluation methods.