MAI-Image-2.6 launches at No. 2 on Arena ahead of Google, Meta and xAI

Today, we’re announcing MAI-Image-2.6 – ranked second on the Arena text-to-image leaderboard.

It’s another significant climb for the MAI-Image family, improving +79 Elo over MAI-Image-2.5 overall, with gains across every Arena text-to-image category. Text rendering alone improves by +91 Elo.

This result firmly establishes MAI-Image ahead of leading models from Meta, Google and xAI.

Another step up in quality

With every MAI-Image release, we’re focused on moving the quality frontier forward.

MAI-Image-1 gave us the foundation. MAI-Image-2 made a major jump in photorealism, text and creative range. MAI-Image-2.5 pushed further into professional-grade imagery and editing.

MAI-Image-2.6 continues that climb with broad gains across different categories that we know our users care about most:

• Stronger text rendering
• Better portraits and 3D imagery
• More polished commercial and photorealistic outputs, with stronger results across product, branding and cinematic use cases

In the Arena evaluations, MAI-Image-2.6 significantly improves on 2.5 in every measured category.

And there’s more to 2.6 – from working across multiple references and richer grounding to greater control over reasoning, format and resolution. We’ll share more on that soon.

More to come

MAI-Image-2.6 is another step in building our hill-climbing machine for image generation: continuously improving quality, expanding capability, and turning those gains into models that are more useful for real creative work.

Try MAI-Image-2.6 for text-to-image today on Arena. Coming later this week to MAI Playground, and rolling out soon across Microsoft Foundry and other products.