MAI-Image-2.6
By Microsoft AI · Microsoft AI (United States)
Microsoft's own image model, built in-house as the company grows less reliant on OpenAI.
Not enough plays yet — the fool rate appears once this model has been shown in a finished puzzle.
MAI-Image-2.6 is an image generation and editing model from Microsoft AI, Microsoft's consumer AI division. Microsoft announced it in August 2026, when it entered the public Arena text-to-image leaderboard in second place, behind only OpenAI's GPT Image 2. On 4 September it reached developers in public preview through Microsoft Foundry, the company's cloud platform for AI, alongside a faster sibling called MAI-Image-2.6-Flash.
Microsoft pitches it for commercial and photorealistic work, such as product shots, branding and cinematic scenes, and says it is strong on portraits and on text inside images. It can combine people, products and styles from several reference pictures in one edit, and can draw on current information from the web.
Who makes it
Microsoft AI was set up in March 2024 to run Copilot, Bing and Microsoft's other consumer AI products. It is led by Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and later of Inflection AI. Microsoft is one of OpenAI's biggest backers and has long used OpenAI's models in its products, but in 2025 it began building its own as well, and in November that year Suleyman launched a new MAI Superintelligence team.
History
MAI-Image-1, Microsoft's first image model built entirely in-house, was unveiled in October 2025. It went into Bing Image Creator next to OpenAI's DALL-E 3 and GPT-4o, and Microsoft said it had worked with creative professionals to avoid the samey, over-stylised look of many AI images. MAI-Image-2 followed in March 2026 with a big jump in photorealism and lettering, and began rolling out in Copilot and Bing Image Creator. A cheaper MAI-Image-2-Efficient and an editing-focused MAI-Image-2.5 came in the spring.
Version 2.6 improved on 2.5 in every category Arena measures, with the biggest gain in text rendering. Microsoft moves quickly, though: MAI Image 2.7, aimed at harder edits, was announced in October 2026.
Where you'll see it
Developers can use MAI-Image-2.6 through Microsoft Foundry, and anyone can try it on Microsoft's MAI Playground or on Arena. Earlier MAI image models are already inside Bing Image Creator and Copilot, so a picture made with Microsoft's free tools may well come from this family.
Sources: Microsoft AI: MAI Image 2.6 launches at No. 2 on Arena · Microsoft AI: Pushing the quality-cost frontier with MAI-Image-2.6 · Microsoft AI: Introducing MAI-Image-1 · Microsoft AI: Introducing MAI-Image-2 · Microsoft AI: MAI Image 2.7 · Windows Report · Wikipedia: Microsoft AI
Last reviewed 2026-10-07.