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.
At the center of the release is MAI-Thinking-1, a reasoning model that Microsoft describes as its flagship text foundation model.
Seven new models launching at Build: let’s go!Reasoning. Code. Image. Transcribe. Voice.
Built from scratch on a clean data lineage, designed for efficiency, working seamlessly as a family of models
According to Suleyman, MAI-Thinking-1 was preferred over Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 in blind tests conducted by independent evaluators. He added that the model scored 97% on AIME 2025, a benchmark that measures advanced problem-solving and reasoning skills.
Suleyman said the SWE Bench Pro result places the model "right alongside Opus 4.6 on one of the toughest coding benchmarks."
The company also introduced MAI-Code-1-Flash, a lightweight coding model built for GitHub Copilot and Visual Studio Code; MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash variant, which Microsoft says outperform Google's Nano Banana Pro on image-editing tasks; MAI Transcribe-1.5, a transcription model that supports 43 languages; and MAI-Voice-2, a speech-generation model capable of producing natural-sounding voices in 15 languages and adapting to a speaker from a short audio sample.
The announcement comes as competition among leading AI developers continues to intensify.
Microsoft’s new model launch suggests a broader effort to build proprietary AI systems as it expands beyond its longstanding reliance on OpenAI technology, saying that MAI “delivered the highest win rate, outperforming GPT-5.5 on quality, while being 10x lower on cost.”
“Developers and businesses have been crying out for AI that delivers on their terms and under their say,” Suleyman wrote. “We see this as a major step towards delivering that.”
