MAI-Image-2.5 launches at No. 2 for image editing on Arena
MAI-Image-2.5 is our strongest image model yet – and now ranks No. 2 on Arena’s Image Edit leaderboard, ahead of Nano Banana 2.1
Built for high-quality generation and precise, controllable editing, it brings production-ready image workflows to developers and Microsoft products.
Today, we’re launching MAI-Image-2.5 for maximum fidelity, and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash for fast, scalable production workloads.
Features and capabilities
Step-change in text-to-image quality
MAI-Image-2.5 produces more detailed, coherent images from prompts, with stronger text rendering, product imagery and prompt adherence.
Complex visual reasoning
The model understands scene structure, lighting, scale, and spatial relationships, helping it make edits that fit the image context, such as adding an object with the right perspective and shadows.
Fine-grained edit control
MAI-Image-2.5 supports precise, localized edits, from replacing an object or updating text to removing motion blur, without changing the rest of the image.
Face and identity consistency
MAI-Image-2.5 preserves facial identity across edits, maintaining recognizable likeness even through changes in pose, expression or viewpoint.
Benchmarks
MAI-Image-2.5 achieves Arena scores that surpass GPT-Image-1.5 and Nano Banana Pro 2K, ranking No. 3 for text-to-image and No. 2 on Arena’s image-editing leaderboard.
Across these evaluations, MAI-Image-2.5 demonstrates leading performance in image generation and editing, with strong results across prompt adherence, visual quality, and controlled image modification.
Arena Model Scores
Figure 1. MAI-Image-2.5 Arena scores across all text-to-image categories, compared against MAI-Image-2 and MAI-Image-1 as of June 1st 2026. MAI-Image-2.5 delivers an overall +75 point improvement over MAI-Image-2, with the largest gains in Text Rendering (+107) and Cartoon, Anime & Fantasy (+90).
Figure 2. MAI-Image-2.5 win rates across 12 editing categories on Arena, evaluated via blind human preference judging against all active models from May 31st to June 1st. Each bar shows the share of matches won by MAI-Image-2.5 (green), won by the competitor (light brown), or judged a tie. Categories are sorted by MAI-Image-2.5 net advantage, defined as (win % minus loss %) descending.. Only categories with ≥100 judged matches are shown; matches where both outputs were rated poor are excluded.
Powering Microsoft products
MAI-Image-2.5 is live on PowerPoint and rolling out to OneDrive, bringing high-quality generation and precise editing.
In OneDrive, users can make precise photo edits – removing unwanted distractions, cleaning up backgrounds, and enhancing images while preserving the original scene.
In PowerPoint, users can generate presentation-ready visuals and slides from prompts, turning ideas into polished decks faster.
Best price-to-performance models
MAI-Image-2.5 is available to developers in Foundry today, delivering premium quality and fine-grained editing control at $5 per 1M text input tokens, $8 per 1M image input tokens, and $47 per 1M image output tokens.
MAI-Image-2.5-Flash offers faster, lower-cost generation and editing at $1.75 per 1M text input tokens, $1.75 per 1M image input tokens, and $19.50 per 1M image output tokens.
Together, they give customers the flexibility to optimize production image workflows for fidelity, speed, or cost, while delivering leading price-to-performance on Arena score.
Safety and limitations
MAI-Image-2.5 includes layered safety guardrails, including prompt and output filtering, to help detect and block harmful or policy-violating content.
Like all image models, MAI-Image-2.5 can reflect biases in its training data and may produce plausible but inaccurate or misleading visual details. Generated images should be reviewed before use in sensitive contexts, including identity, legal, medical, financial, or news-related workflows.
Try it out
MAI-Image-2.5 and MAI-Image-2.5-Flash are now available to developers in Foundry, bringing high-quality image generation and precise, controllable editing to production workflows.
You can also try the models directly in the MAI Playground.
OpenRouter is also making MAI-Image-2.5 available to its developer community:
“We’re excited to bring Microsoft’s MAI models to OpenRouter. MAI-Image-2.5 is one of the strongest image models available today, and expands the set of multimodal capabilities available to developers on OpenRouter. Our goal is simple: when great new models launch, the 9 million developers building on OpenRouter should be able to use them immediately through the same API they already use.” – Alex Atallah, CEO, OpenRouter”
- As of June 2, 2026.
Build the Future With Us
We’re a lean, fast-moving lab made up of some of the world’s most talented minds. We have an exciting roadmap of compute at MAI, with our next-generation GB200 cluster now operational. And we have an ambitious mission we truly believe in. We’re also fortunate to partner with incredible product teams giving our models the chance to reach billions of users and create immense positive impact. If you’re a brilliant, highly-ambitious and low ego individual, you’ll fit right in—come and join us as we work on our next generation of models!
