Microsoft (MS) unveiled seven new artificial intelligence (AI) models it developed in-house. The move is seen as an effort to reduce its reliance on OpenAI and to step up its push into the enterprise AI market.
On the 2nd (local time), at its annual developer conference Build held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, MS introduced seven AI models, including its first coding AI model, "MAI-Code-1-Flash," and a reasoning AI model, "MAI-Thinking-1." MS touted high efficiency as the new models' strength.
Kyle Daigle, MS developer and GitHub chief operating officer (COO), said, "MAI-Thinking-1 is a high-performance mid-sized model with 35 billion active parameters, characterized by low token (the smallest unit of AI computation) expense." MAI-Thinking-1 is a model trained from scratch on data secured by MS without using the "distillation" technique of creating a model with similar performance by leveraging other AI models' outputs as training data.
It is cited for strengths in carrying out complex multi-step instructions, long-context reasoning, and code generation. MS said the model received a score similar to Anthropic's "Claude Opus 4.6" on SWE Bench Pro, a performance benchmark that measures AI coding ability.
Mustafa Suleyman, MS AI chief executive officer (CEO), also emphasized that compared with OpenAI's GPT-5.5, this model is a high-efficiency model with up to 10 times better cost efficiency and lower token consumption. In particular, he said running it on MS's in-house AI chip "Maia 200" and its Azure cloud can deliver higher efficiency than using Nvidia's latest graphics processing unit (GPU), Grace Blackwell (GB)200.
MS also unveiled MAI-Code-1, a coding model aimed at corporate customers. With vibe coding—creating code by entering commands—gaining popularity and Anthropic and OpenAI aggressively developing coding tools, MS has thrown its hat into the ring.
In an interview with the Financial Times (FT), CEO Suleyman said, "Like Anthropic, we are focusing on coding for corporations and developers," adding, "We have significantly narrowed the gap with Anthropic over the past six months."
It also unveiled MAI-Image-2.5 and its Flash version, which support image generation and editing, and the voice model MAI-Voice-2.
MS also launched Scout, a 24/7 work AI agent, on the day. It is built on OpenColo, an open-source (open) agent platform. Scout uses Teams, Outlook, and more to help users prepare for meetings, manage schedules, and handle repetitive tasks.
MS CEO Satya Nadella said, "The core of Build 2026 is not a single technology but enabling value creation and scale on the platform," adding, "MS is broadening the foundation for developers to create greater value through an AI stack that spans from Edge to the cloud."