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Microsoft unveiled seven AI models under its MAI brand at Build 2026, marking its biggest in-house AI push. The lineup includes reasoning, coding, voice and image models, all trained from scratch. Led by MAI-Thinking-1, the move signals Microsoft’s growing independence from OpenAI and its ambition to compete at the AI frontier.

Microsoft used its annual Build developer conference to announce seven new AI models developed entirely in-house under the MAI brand. The launch, announced by Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, spans reasoning, coding, image generation, transcription, and voice. It is the broadest model release in the company's history and marks a clear signal that Microsoft is building its own AI capabilities independent of its relationship with OpenAI.

The headline model is MAI-Thinking-1, Microsoft's first purpose-built reasoning model. All seven models were trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data, with no distillation from any third-party AI lab. Suleyman framed the launch as the debut of what he calls a 'hill-climbing machine', a shared training infrastructure designed to keep Microsoft's models competitive as global compute resources scale dramatically over the coming years.

MAI-Thinking-1

MAI-Thinking-1 is Microsoft AI's flagship reasoning model and the centrepiece of the Build announcement. It is a sparse Mixture-of-Experts model with 35 billion active parameters and approximately one trillion total parameters, an architecture that delivers a smaller inference footprint than dense models of comparable capability. Microsoft says it matches Claude Opus 4.6 on the SWE-Bench Pro software engineering benchmark and reaches 97.0 percent on the AIME 2025 mathematics benchmark and 94.5 percent on AIME 2026, placing it among the strongest models in its weight class on both coding and maths tasks.