Microsoft ditches OpenAI reliance with MAI-Thinking-1
microsoft launched maai-thinking-1, a medium-sized model trained without distillation that matches leading models on software engineering benchmarks, signaling a shift away from its openai dependence.
microsoft announced maai-thinking-1, its first advanced reasoning model, as part of a suite of seven new in-house ai models revealed at build 2026. the company stated that the medium-sized model was trained entirely on clean data without distillation from third-party providers and performs competitively on software engineering tasks. this release underscores microsoft's evolving strategy to reduce reliance on openai following a renegotiated partnership deal. additional releases include maai-image 2.5 for editing and maai-code-1-flash for efficient inference in developer tools.