In brief
Microsoft said its new MAI-Thinking-1 model outperformed Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 in blind evaluations and matched Claude Opus 4.6 on a leading coding benchmark.
The company said its MAI-Image-2.5 models surpassed Google's Nano Banana 2 on image-editing leaderboards.
The launch marks Microsoft's most ambitious effort yet to develop proprietary frontier AI models alongside its partnership with OpenAI.
On the first day of the annual Microsoft Build event on Tuesday, the Windows developer unveiled seven new AI models, claiming they outperformed Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 and Google's Nano Banana 2 in blind testing and image-editing benchmarks.The claim comes as Microsoft attempts to establish itself as a frontier AI developer rather than solely OpenAI's largest backer and infrastructure provider."Super excited to announce seven new world-class MAI models today," Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote on X. "They represent what we consider a new era in AI designed to keep you in control and on the frontier."At the center of the release is MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model that Microsoft describes as its flagship text foundation model.
