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
Sources