Microsoft

Microsoft spent years as OpenAI's largest backer and distributor, and in June 2026 it stepped onto the field as a frontier lab in its own right. At Build 2026 on June 2, Microsoft AI announced MAI-Code-1-Flash, its first in-house coding model, and MAI-Thinking-1, its first reasoning model. MAI-Code-1-Flash rolls out across all GitHub Copilot tiers at $0.75 per million input and $4.50 per million output with a 256K context window, and Microsoft claims it beats Claude Haiku 4.5 on price to performance while using 60% fewer tokens on hard tasks. MAI-Thinking-1, a 35B-active-parameter MoE with a 256K context window, posted 97% on AIME 25 and 53% on SWE-Bench Pro, which Microsoft says matches Claude Opus 4.6, and sits in private preview on Microsoft Foundry with distribution planned through Fireworks AI, Baseten, and OpenRouter. The launches are widely read as Microsoft reducing its dependence on OpenAI models inside Copilot.