Microsoft kicked off its annual Build developer conference Tuesday with a keynote, during which the company announced seven new AI models, including its first reasoning model. During the keynote, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman reiterated the lab's "humanist superintelligence" framing when introducing the new models.

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Microsoft AI's first reasoning model, MAI-Thinking-1, was trained on "enterprise-grade, clean and commercially licensed data," the company said in the blog announcement. Given mounting concerns (and active lawsuits) about copyright and AI use, calling this out will be important for Microsoft's customers, but it's not the first company to make such a promise.

Microsoft said that the 35-billion-parameter model beat Anthropic's Sonnet 4.61 when evaluated by independent reviewers in a blind test, and that it aligns with Anthropic Opus 4.6 in its SWE Bench Pro benchmark score for coding. In keeping with the agentic craze gripping all AI labs at the moment, MAI-Thinking-1 is designed for multi-step tasks and is available in Microsoft Foundry in private preview for now.

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Also joining the Microsoft AI family (and the overall race to build the top coding model on the market) is MAI-Code-1, which the company described as "ultra-efficient" and "tuned for GitHub." MAI-Code-1 is coming to Copilot and VS Code on Tuesday.