Microsoft is dropping a family of seven new AI models, the company announced on Tuesday during the opening keynote of Build, its annual developer conference. The blockbuster highlight is the 35-billion-parameter MAI-Thinking-1, which Microsoft AI lead Mustafa Suleyman described onstage during the keynote as Microsoft’s “first reasoning model,” and said that independent early testers “prefer it in overall quality, side-by-side, versus [Anthropic’s Claude] Sonnet 4.6.” MAI-Thinking-1 also scored 97% on the AIME benchmark, which measures advanced mathematical and problem-solving abilities, and “most importantly of all,” a 53% on SWE Bench Pro, which measures the ability of AI agents to handle complex coding tasks. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 currently scores at 51.9%, but OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 has achieved a 59.1% score, according to data from Scale Labs, the model performance tracking division of Scale AI. The big selling point was that MAI-Image-1 was trained “entirely from the bottom,” as Suleyman put it. That is, it was trained solely to be an outstanding reasoning model across a range of possible tasks, rather than to perform well on specific benchmark tests. It was also trained “with absolutely zero distillation,” according to Suleyman. “Distillation” is AI industry jargon for using another model, perhaps one built by a rival company, to train a new one; in that way, models can become a kind of scaffolding for other developers to use and build on. Microsoft’s pitch to enterprise customers is basically that distillation can lead to trouble down the road, since there’s so much uncertainty and legal controversy around the matter of sourcing training data and potential copyright infringement. The more clearly you can track the origin of the data within the AI tools you’re using, the better. MAI-Image-1 “is created with an enterprise-grade, clean, and commercially licensed data lineage, that means you can put it into production in a very trustworthy way with complete confidence.” We will have to wait and see for a more thorough explanation of exactly how Microsoft licensed all the training data for this model, but that’s the basic pitch to businesses.