Models
Pushing the quality-cost frontier with MAI-Image-2.6
MAI-Image-2.6 is our strongest image model yet. Today, we’re bringing it to developers in Microsoft Foundry and expanding the family with MAI-Image-2.6-Flash – built to deliver that same level of quality for latency-sensitive, high-throughput production workloads.
Both models come with support for multi-image reference editing, web grounding, and dynamic aspect ratios. Developers now have choice between maximum precision with MAI-Image-2.6 and production speed with MAI-Image-2.6-Flash.
Quality at production speed
MAI-Image-2.6 has established itself among the industry’s leading image models. Today, it ranks No. 2 for both text to image and image editing on Arena.[1] On Artificial Analysis, it ranks No. 2 for text-to-image and No. 1 for image editing.[2]
MAI-Image-2.6-Flash brings comparable quality to latency-sensitive, high-throughput workloads. It is able to generate images 2.8x faster than GPT-Image-2-Medium while delivering 72% greater efficiency.
Leading quality for the price
MAI-Image-2.6’s combination of quality and efficiency delivers the best price-per-Elo performance in the world, helping production teams scale high-quality image generation while keeping token usage and costs under control.
More ways to create
We’ve been listening closely to how users create with our image models and have expanded their capabilities around the creative workflows that matter most.
The latest models offer more control, more context, and more ways to bring ideas to life:
- Multi-reference editing brings together people, products, styles, and scenes from different images
- Web grounding pulls info from across the web to create rich visuals informed by relevant, up-to-date information
- Higher resolutions and dynamic aspect ratios chooses the optimal format for compositions with support for up to 1.5K resolution.
Start Creating
Try both models in MAI Playground, or start building in Public Preview through Microsoft Foundry.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] As of Sep 4, 2026
[2] As of Sep 4, 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, which is ramping quickly and extensively. 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!
