Microsoft is the cloud and enterprise software company behind Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot. In AI it plays two roles at once: it is the largest distributor of other labs’ models through Microsoft Foundry, and, since 2025, a model builder in its own right through Microsoft AI, the division led by Mustafa Suleyman.
From OpenAI partner to in-house models
Microsoft AI was formed in March 2024 and shipped its first in-house models, MAI-Voice-1 and MAI-1-preview, in August 2025, followed by MAI-Image-1 in October 2025. In November 2025 it announced a superintelligence team with a stated focus on what it calls humanist superintelligence. The direction is clear: Microsoft still hosts OpenAI models, but it now trains its own frontier-class systems rather than relying on a single partner.
The MAI model line-up
- MAI-Thinking-1: Microsoft’s first reasoning model. It was unveiled at Build on June 2, 2026 in private preview and moved to public preview in Foundry on August 12, 2026. Microsoft describes a sparse mixture-of-experts with roughly 1T total and 35B active parameters, a 256K-token context window, and training from scratch without distillation from third-party models. It is not open-weight.
- MAI-Code-1: a coding model available in GitHub Copilot and VS Code (announced at Build 2026).
- MAI-Image-2.5, MAI-Voice-2 and MAI-Transcribe-1.5: image, speech and transcription models, each rolling into Microsoft products and Foundry.
Why it matters for builders
For most readers, Microsoft shows up as a price list rather than a model. Our analysis of Microsoft Foundry and Google AI pricing changes in September 2026 covers the regional premiums that now apply to Foundry deployments. On the developer side, GitHub’s Project HydraFusion research preview shows how Microsoft is moving Copilot toward multi-model orchestration instead of a single default model.
Microsoft is also a presence in open models through its research releases, and our open-source LLM guide tracks which of its checkpoints carry permissive licenses.
What to watch
- Independent benchmarks for MAI-Thinking-1 beyond Microsoft’s own figures.
- Foundry pricing by region and model family.
- Whether any MAI model is released with open weights.
Facts on this page were last checked on September 23, 2026 against Microsoft AI’s MAI-Thinking-1 announcement, Microsoft Build 2026 coverage and public records of Microsoft AI’s model releases. See our corrections policy if you spot something out of date.