Microsoft launches seven in-house MAI models at Build 2026, led by MAI-Thinking-1
At Build on 2026-06-02 Microsoft AI (led by Mustafa Suleyman) launched seven first-party MAI models, including its first flagship reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1, the MAI-Code-1-Flash coding model in GitHub Copilot and VS Code, MAI-Image-2.5, MAI-Transcribe-1.5 and MAI-Voice-2 - Microsoft's clearest move from reselling OpenAI models to owning its own stack.
Key facts
- Announced 2026-06-02 at Microsoft Build
- MAI-Thinking-1: first flagship reasoning model; Microsoft says it matches leading models on key SWE benchmarks and is preferred to Sonnet 4.6 in its evals
- Press reports MAI-Thinking-1 as a 35B-active-parameter MoE scoring 97.0% on AIME 2025 (secondary sources)
- MAI-Code-1-Flash: agentic coding model, 5B active parameters, in GitHub Copilot and VS Code
- MAI-Image-2.5 (+ Flash): Microsoft claims it surpasses Nano Banana Pro's Arena score; in PowerPoint and Foundry
- MAI-Transcribe-1.5: 43 languages, claimed 5x faster than competing models
- MAI-Voice-2: speech generation in 15 languages with emotional control
- Available on Microsoft Foundry, OpenRouter, Fireworks and Baseten
What happened
Microsoft AI released seven models spanning reasoning, coding, image generation, transcription and voice. The flagship MAI-Thinking-1 is Microsoft's first frontier-class reasoning model; MAI-Code-1-Flash (5B active parameters) went straight into GitHub Copilot and VS Code. The models are available via Microsoft Foundry and third-party hosts, and developers can tune weights.
Why it matters
Coming weeks after the renegotiated OpenAI deal, the launch shows Microsoft hedging its OpenAI dependence with a first-party model family deployed across its biggest products.
Parameter count and AIME score for MAI-Thinking-1 come from press coverage, not the official post.
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Models
- MAI-Voice-2 / MAI-Voice-2-Flash Microsoft · preview
Related events
- Microsoft and OpenAI restructure partnership, drop the AGI clause and exclusivity ★★★★
- Nadella puts Microsoft's MAI model "Code of Conduct" out for public consultation ★★
- Microsoft makes its own Azure Realtime speech-to-speech model generally available in the Voice Live API ★★
- Microsoft launches MAI-Transcribe-2, claiming the most accurate and cheapest speech recognition at $0.10/hour ★★★
Sources (4)
- officialMicrosoft AI - Launching seven new MAI models
- officialMicrosoft AI - Build 2026 MAI keynote transcript
- pressThurrott - Build 2026: Microsoft launches first flagship reasoning AI model
- pressThe AI Economy - Microsoft launches MAI-Thinking-1 and MAI-Code-1 at Build
id: 2026-06-02-microsoft-mai-models-build-2026 · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline