MAI-Thinking-1
MAI-Thinking-1 is worth evaluating for coding, rag, and agents when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating coding, rag, and agents
- Workloads that can use a 256k context window
- Buyers comparing 1 tracked provider route
Do not use it for
- Vision or document-understanding workloads
- Family
- MAI
- Released
- 2026-06-02
- Context
- 256k
- Max output
- 64,000
- Parameters
- 1T total / 35B active
- Architecture
- Mixture of Experts
- Specialization
- reasoning
- Openness
- Proprietary
- License
- ProprietaryCommercial use: conditional
- Weights
- Not released
- Code
- Unknown
- Training
- Pretrained
Cheapest of 1 route · Microsoft Foundry
About
MAI-Thinking-1 is Microsoft AI's flagship reasoning model, built from scratch on enterprise-grade commercially licensed data without third-party distillation. The sparse mixture-of-experts model activates about 35B parameters from roughly 1T total parameters, supports a 256K-token context window, and targets frontier reasoning and software engineering work at a mid-weight price point. Microsoft reports 97% on AIME 2025, 94.5% on AIME 2026, 84.2% on GPQA Diamond, 87.7% on LiveCodeBench v6, 73.5% on SWE-bench Verified, and 52.8% on SWE-bench Pro. In a 1,276-task Surge blind side-by-side evaluation, it narrowly beat Claude Sonnet 4.6 but trailed Claude Opus 4.6.
Top use-case fit: coding, agents, and build tasks
Coding
3 relevant benchmarks in the decision map.
RAG
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Agents
2 relevant benchmarks in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
Compare API pricing across 1 providers for input and output tokens, batch, and cached reads when available.
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Foundry | - | - | ServerlessPartial |
Available via routers & gateways(5)
LiteLLM
GatewayOpen-source Python SDK and proxy server that unifies 100+ LLM APIs behind a single OpenAI-compatible interface, with load balancing, cost tracking, and configurable failover.
Portkey
GatewayProduction AI gateway routing to 1,600+ LLMs with failover, load balancing, semantic caching, and guardrails; Apache 2.0 core is fully self-hostable with the complete feature set.
Azure AI Foundry Model Router
RouterMicrosoft Azure AI Foundry's native model router that uses a trained ML model to route each prompt in real time to the optimal Azure-hosted model, with Balanced/Cost/Quality mode selection and automatic failover.
Helicone
GatewayObservability-first AI gateway with routing, caching, rate limiting, and request tracing; Apache 2.0 open-source core with a managed hosted tier for logging and analytics.
Kong AI Gateway
GatewayMulti-LLM AI gateway built on Kong Gateway 3.x, adding semantic routing, load balancing, guardrails, and MCP traffic analytics as plugins over Kong's existing API management platform.
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor Coding
Benchmark scores(10)
| Benchmark | Score | Version | Evaluation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AIME 2025 | 97.0 | AIME 2025Observed 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| AIME 2026 | 94.5 | AIME 2026Observed 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| HMMT February 2026 | 84.9 | HMMT Feb 2026Observed 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| Google-Proof Q&A | 84.2 | GPQA DiamondObserved 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| LiveCodeBench | 87.7 | v6Observed 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| Terminal-Bench 2.0 | 46.0 | Terminal-Bench 2.0Observed 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| SWE-bench Verified | 73.5 | SWE-bench VerifiedObserved 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| SWE-bench Pro | 52.8 | Public datasetObserved 2026-06-02 | — | Source |
| MMLU PRO | 85.0 | MMLU-Pro (accuracy)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
| MultiChallenge | 53.0 | Multi-Challenge leaderboard rank 15 of 28 (accuracy%)Observed 2026-06-07 | — | Source |
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.
Rankings & picks(1)
Cheapest of 1 route · Microsoft Foundry