Orchard: An open framework for scalable agentic AI

At a glance Orchard is an open-source framework for scalable and cost-effective agentic AI research, built around Orchard Env, a reusable environment service for training and evaluating agents across task domains. The same Orchard infrastructure supports software-engineering, web-navigation, and personal-assistant agents, and can train them directly inside real deployment harnesses such as Codex, OpenClaw, and ZeroClaw—letting researchers reuse environments, data pipelines, and evaluation workflows across tasks. Orchard-SWE, Orchard-GUI, and Orchard-Claw demonstrate that relatively small open-weight models can achieve strong results on complex real-world tasks. For example, Orchard-SWE reaches 69.7% on SWE-bench Verified—73.0% with value-model reranking—using only about 3 billion active parameters, approaching frontier systems using more than 10 times larger models. Alongside the models and workflows, the project releases training data and evaluation methods intended to help the broader research community build and study open agentic systems. Artificial intelligence is rapidly moving beyond static question-answering toward autonomous agents that can plan, reason, and act across complex, multistep environments. These systems can fix bugs in complex codebases, navigate the web on a user’s behalf, and manage workflows involving calendars and email. While there is excitement around agentic AI’s capabilities, the research community faces a persistent bottleneck. Building state-of-the-art agentic systems often requires proprietary infrastructure, including custom sandboxes, closed training pipelines, and proprietary datasets that most researchers and practitioners cannot access or reproduce. To address this gap, we introduce Orchard (opens in new tab), an open-source framework for scalable agentic modeling. At the center of Orchard is Orchard Env, a lightweight, Kubernetes environment that provides reusable isolated components for running and building agents at scale—from collecting training data to reinforcement learning rollouts and evaluation. Unlike many existing frameworks, Orchard Env is designed to support different agent systems and task types without modification. The same service can support software-engineering agents, web-browsing agents, and personal-assistant agents across domains. To demonstrate this approach, we are releasing three domain-specific training recipes—Orchard-SWE, Orchard-GUI, and Orchard-Claw. (opens in new tab) We are also releasing the training data and evaluation methods used to build them. PODCAST SERIES The AI Revolution in Medicine, Revisited Join Microsoft’s Peter Lee on a journey to discover how AI is impacting healthcare and what it means for the future of medicine. Listen now Opens in a new tab Environment layer that scales across types of tasks The central idea behind Orchard is that the runtime environment should be a standalone, reusable service rather than infrastructure embedded inside a specific training framework. Orchard Env’s Kubernetes foundation enables it to create, manage, and remove thousands of isolated components in parallel. The system is designed to work across tasks like coding, web browsing, using tools. It is also designed to work across different agent systems, along with stages of the training and evaluation process, including data distillation and reinforcement learning rollouts. This flexibility makes Orchard practical at a research scale. Teams can introduce new benchmarks, agent systems, or training algorithms without rebuilding the underlying infrastructure from scratch. Orchard also makes it possible to train agents inside any harness. Today’s most capable agents rarely run as a bare model. They operate through sophisticated harnesses—such as Claude Code, Codex, an