Microsoft’s first advanced reasoning AI is here

Microsoft announced MAI-Thinking-1, a new in-house AI model designed for advanced reasoning tasks, at its Build 2026 conference. The company claims this medium-sized model performs as well as leading models on software engineering benchmarks and was trained from scratch on clean data without using techniques from other companies' models. This represents Microsoft's growing effort to develop its own AI models instead of relying solely on its partnership with OpenAI.