Models
MAI Image 2.6 launches at No. 2 on Arena ahead of Google, Meta and xAI
Updated as of October 27th, 2026
MAI Image 2.6 and MAI Image 2.6 Flash are now generally available in Microsoft Foundry. Learn more about the launch here.
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.
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