Release2026-08-12

Microsoft released MAI-Thinking-1, its own reasoning model, in public preview on Microsoft Foundry. Microsoft says it was trained without copying outputs from other labs' models, matches Claude Opus 4.6 on a software engineering benchmark, and was preferred to Claude Sonnet 4.6 by paid human raters. It is a preview, and the comparison figures come from Microsoft's own testing.

What changed

Microsoft's in-house MAI family had no dedicated step-by-step reasoning model of this size.

What it unlocks

Testing a Microsoft-built reasoning model for coding and maths work through Microsoft Foundry, with a context window large enough for very long documents.

  • 35B active, ~1T total parameters
  • 97.0% on AIME 2025
  • 256k token context window
  • 1,276 tasks in human evaluation

What you need to act on it

  • Microsoft Foundry access
  • public preview

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