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Microsoft AI: MAI-Image-2.6

microsoft/mai-image-2.6

BenchmarksCompare

MAI-Image-2.6 is an image generation and editing model from Microsoft AI, the precision tier of the MAI-Image-2.6 family alongside the faster MAI-Image-2.6 Flash. It is suited for design-ready visuals and controlled, iterative editing, and is particularly strong at multi-reference editing that combines people, products, styles, and scenes from up to five input images while preserving composition, style, and detail. Aspect ratio can be fixed or left to the model to choose for the composition.

Modalities

In / Out Price

$8 / $38per 1M

Context

4K

Released

Sep 4, 2026

BenchmarksCompare
PlaygroundProvidersPricingPerformanceUptimeBenchmarksAppsActivityFAQExplore

Playground

Providers

This model is hosted by one provider. OpenRouter forwards every request to it directly — no routing decisions to make.

Pricing

The average price customers actually pay for this model, next to the prices providers post. Caching and discounts mean the price actually paid is often well below the listed one.

Performance

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

Uptime

Uptime is the percentage of the past 3 days that at least one provider was responding to requests. Availability is the percentage of time that inference was successfully served. OpenRouter continuously monitors and uses the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Benchmarks

Scores on standardized evaluations. Higher percentages are better — and rank percentile shows where this model lands among all models on OpenRouter.

Benchmark score summary for Microsoft AI: MAI-Image-2.6 (Design Arena)
SourceBenchmarkScore
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Models Arena Graphic Design Elo1343
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Models Arena Image Elo1316
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Models Arena Imageediting Elo1246
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Models Arena Logo Elo1298

Apps

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Activity

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Quick Start

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.

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100.00%

End-to-end latency

50.86s

P50, best provider

Uptime (3d)The model was reachable. Request routed to a provider.

100.00%

Availability (3d)The model returned inference from any provider. Errors and empty responses count against it.

98.59%

Availability over the last 3 days

Last 72 hours
Availability 98.59%
3 Days Ago2 Days AgoYesterdayNow

Availability over the last 24 hours

OpenRouter Availability
98.69%

When an error occurs in an upstream provider, we can recover by routing to another healthy provider, if your request filters allow it. You can access per-provider uptime data programmatically through the Endpoints API. Learn more about our load balancing and customization options.

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Frequently asked questions

MAI-Image-2.6 is an image generation and editing model from Microsoft AI, the precision tier of the MAI-Image-2.6 family alongside the faster MAI-Image-2.6 Flash. It is suited for design-ready visuals and controlled, iterative editing, and is particularly strong at multi-reference editing that combines people, products, styles, and scenes from up to five input images while preserving...

MAI-Image-2.6 costs $5.00/M tokens for Text Input, $8.00/M tokens for Image Input and $38.00/M tokens for Image Output.

MAI-Image-2.6 supports the 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 1 more aspect ratios.

MAI-Image-2.6 accepts text and images as input and returns images. Up to 5 reference images can be attached to one request for image editing.

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash, MAI-Image-2.5 Pro and MAI-Image-2.5 are other image models from Microsoft.

MAI-Image-2.6 was released on September 4, 2026.

More models from Microsoft

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash is the lower-latency, lower-cost member of the MAI-Image-2.6 family from Microsoft AI, built for latency-sensitive, high-throughput production image generation and editing at comparable quality to the precision tier. It supports the same multi-reference editing with up to five input images and the same fixed or model-chosen aspect ratios.

Image$2.50 / $19
MAI-Transcribe 2

MAI-Transcribe 2 is a multilingual speech-to-text model from Microsoft AI, ranked #1 on the FLEURS multilingual benchmark. It supports 60 languages with automatic language identification, code switching for mixed-language speech, speaker diarization, word-level timestamps, keyword biasing for domain-specific terminology, and configurable verbatim or clean transcription styles. It is suited for captions, call transcription, subtitling, accessibility, and other voice-enabled applications, and is faster than MAI-Transcribe-1.5 on long-form audio.

On OpenRouter, set response_format to "verbose_json" for segment timestamps, and add timestamp_granularities: ["word"] for word-level timestamps. Set provider.options.azure.diarization.enabled to true for speaker labels, provide keywords through provider.options.azure.phraseList.phrases, and select a transcription style through provider.options.azure.enhancedMode.modelOptions.transcribeStyle. See the speech-to-text guide.

Transcription$0.10/hour
MAI-Image-2.5 Pro

Microsoft AI's MAI-Image-2.5 is a high-quality image generation model available via Azure AI Foundry. It produces photorealistic and artistic images from text prompts with support for various aspect ratios.

Image$8 / $108
MAI-Voice-2-Flash

MAI-Voice-2-Flash is a low-latency text-to-speech model from Microsoft AI for voice agents, assistants, call centers, accessibility, narration, and other interactive applications. It generates expressive 24 kHz mono speech across 15 languages and 18 locales, with fine-grained control over tone and delivery. Voice prompting and cloning require Microsoft AI-approved access and appropriate speaker consent.

Speech$15/M characters
MAI-Voice-2

MAI-Voice-2 is an expressive text-to-speech model from Microsoft AI. It is suited for conversational assistants, media narration, accessibility, education, and other long-form voice applications. It supports 15 languages across 18 locales, fine-grained control of tone and delivery, multi-speaker generation, and voice prompting from short audio clips without fine-tuning. The model prioritizes naturalness and expressivity over latency-critical generation.

Speech$22/M characters
MAI-Transcribe 1.5

MAI-Transcribe 1.5 is a multilingual speech-to-text model from Microsoft AI. It is suited for captions, call transcription, subtitling, accessibility, and other voice-enabled applications, with reliable transcription across 43 languages, diverse accents, and noisy real-world audio. It supports automatic language identification and keyword biasing for domain-specific terminology, and improves long-form transcription speed over MAI-Transcribe-1. Speaker diarization is not supported.

Transcription$0.36/hour
MAI-Image-2.5

Microsoft AI's MAI-Image-2.5 is a high-quality image generation model available via Azure AI Foundry. It produces photorealistic and artistic images from text prompts with support for various aspect ratios.

Image$8 / $47
Phi 4 Mini Instruct

Phi-4-mini-instruct is a lightweight open model built upon synthetic data and filtered publicly available websites - with a focus on high-quality, reasoning dense data. The model belongs to the Phi-4 model family and supports 128K token context length. The model underwent an enhancement process, incorporating both supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization to support precise instruction adherence and robust safety measures.

Text131K context
Phi 4 Reasoning Plus

Phi-4-reasoning-plus is an enhanced 14B parameter model from Microsoft, fine-tuned from Phi-4 with additional reinforcement learning to boost accuracy on math, science, and code reasoning tasks. It uses the same dense decoder-only transformer architecture as Phi-4, but generates longer, more comprehensive outputs structured into a step-by-step reasoning trace and final answer.

While it offers improved benchmark scores over Phi-4-reasoning across tasks like AIME, OmniMath, and HumanEvalPlus, its responses are typically ~50% longer, resulting in higher latency. Designed for English-only applications, it is well-suited for structured reasoning workflows where output quality takes priority over response speed.

Text33K context
Phi 4 Reasoning

Phi-4-reasoning is a 14B parameter dense decoder-only transformer developed by Microsoft, fine-tuned from Phi-4 to enhance complex reasoning capabilities. It uses a combination of supervised fine-tuning on chain-of-thought traces and reinforcement learning, targeting math, science, and code reasoning tasks. With a 32k context window and high inference efficiency, it is optimized for structured responses in a two-part format: reasoning trace followed by a final solution.

The model achieves strong results on specialized benchmarks such as AIME, OmniMath, and LiveCodeBench, outperforming many larger models in structured reasoning tasks. It is released under the MIT license and intended for use in latency-constrained, English-only environments requiring reliable step-by-step logic. Recommended usage includes ChatML prompts and structured reasoning format for best results.

Text33K context
MAI DS R1

MAI-DS-R1 is a post-trained variant of DeepSeek-R1 developed by the Microsoft AI team to improve the model’s responsiveness on previously blocked topics while enhancing its safety profile. Built on top of DeepSeek-R1’s reasoning foundation, it integrates 110k examples from the Tulu-3 SFT dataset and 350k internally curated multilingual safety-alignment samples. The model retains strong reasoning, coding, and problem-solving capabilities, while unblocking a wide range of prompts previously restricted in R1.

MAI-DS-R1 demonstrates improved performance on harm mitigation benchmarks and maintains competitive results across general reasoning tasks. It surpasses R1-1776 in satisfaction metrics for blocked queries and reduces leakage in harmful content categories. The model is based on a transformer MoE architecture and is suitable for general-purpose use cases, excluding high-stakes domains such as legal, medical, or autonomous systems.

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Phi 4 Multimodal Instruct

Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct is a versatile 5.6B parameter foundation model that combines advanced reasoning and instruction-following capabilities across both text and visual inputs, providing accurate text outputs. The unified architecture enables efficient, low-latency inference, suitable for edge and mobile deployments. Phi-4 Multimodal Instruct supports text inputs in multiple languages including Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and more, with visual input optimized primarily for English. It delivers impressive performance on multimodal tasks involving mathematical, scientific, and document reasoning, providing developers and enterprises a powerful yet compact model for sophisticated interactive applications. For more information, see the Phi-4 Multimodal blog post.

Text131K context
Phi 4

Microsoft Research Phi-4 is designed to perform well in complex reasoning tasks and can operate efficiently in situations with limited memory or where quick responses are needed.

At 14 billion parameters, it was trained on a mix of high-quality synthetic datasets, data from curated websites, and academic materials. It has undergone careful improvement to follow instructions accurately and maintain strong safety standards. It works best with English language inputs.

For more information, please see Phi-4 Technical Report

Text16K context$0.07 / $0.14
Phi-3.5 Mini 128K Instruct

Phi-3.5 models are lightweight, state-of-the-art open models. These models were trained with Phi-3 datasets that include both synthetic data and the filtered, publicly available websites data, with a focus on high quality and reasoning-dense properties. Phi-3.5 Mini uses 3.8B parameters, and is a dense decoder-only transformer model using the same tokenizer as Phi-3 Mini.

The models underwent a rigorous enhancement process, incorporating both supervised fine-tuning, proximal policy optimization, and direct preference optimization to ensure precise instruction adherence and robust safety measures. When assessed against benchmarks that test common sense, language understanding, math, code, long context and logical reasoning, Phi-3.5 models showcased robust and state-of-the-art performance among models with less than 13 billion parameters.

Text128K context
Phi-3 Medium 4K Instruct

Phi-3 4K Medium is a powerful 14-billion parameter model designed for advanced language understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. Optimized through supervised fine-tuning and preference adjustments, it excels in tasks involving common sense, mathematics, logical reasoning, and code processing.

At time of release, Phi-3 Medium demonstrated state-of-the-art performance among lightweight models. In the MMLU-Pro eval, the model even comes close to a Llama3 70B level of performance.

For 128k context length, try Phi-3 Medium 128K.

Text4K context
Phi-3 Mini 128K Instruct

Phi-3 Mini is a powerful 3.8B parameter model designed for advanced language understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. Optimized through supervised fine-tuning and preference adjustments, it excels in tasks involving common sense, mathematics, logical reasoning, and code processing.

At time of release, Phi-3 Medium demonstrated state-of-the-art performance among lightweight models. This model is static, trained on an offline dataset with an October 2023 cutoff date.

Text128K context
Phi-3 Medium 128K Instruct

Phi-3 128K Medium is a powerful 14-billion parameter model designed for advanced language understanding, reasoning, and instruction following. Optimized through supervised fine-tuning and preference adjustments, it excels in tasks involving common sense, mathematics, logical reasoning, and code processing.

At time of release, Phi-3 Medium demonstrated state-of-the-art performance among lightweight models. In the MMLU-Pro eval, the model even comes close to a Llama3 70B level of performance.

For 4k context length, try Phi-3 Medium 4K.

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WizardLM-2 8x22B

WizardLM-2 8x22B is Microsoft AI's most advanced Wizard model. It demonstrates highly competitive performance compared to leading proprietary models, and it consistently outperforms all existing state-of-the-art opensource models.

It is an instruct finetune of Mixtral 8x22B.

To read more about the model release, click here.

#moe

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WizardLM-2 7B

WizardLM-2 7B is the smaller variant of Microsoft AI's latest Wizard model. It is the fastest and achieves comparable performance with existing 10x larger opensource leading models

It is a finetune of Mistral 7B Instruct, using the same technique as WizardLM-2 8x22B.

To read more about the model release, click here.

#moe

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