MAI-Thinking-1
MAI-Thinking-1 is worth evaluating for rag, agents, and long context when its provider route and context window match the workload.
Use it for
- Teams evaluating rag, agents, and long context
- 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
- Parameters
- 1T total / 35B active
- Architecture
- sparse_mixture_of_experts
- Specialization
- reasoning
- License
- Proprietary
- 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, parity with Claude Opus 4.6 on SWE-bench Pro, and preference over Claude Sonnet 4.6 in a 1,276-task blind human evaluation. It supports function calling and developer instructions through the Chat Completions API.
MAI-Thinking-1 is a proprietary model in the MAI family. The structured metadata tracks a 256k-token context window, reasoning, function calling, and tool use. This page tracks provider routes through Microsoft Foundry. Headline tracked benchmarks include AIME 2025 97.0 and AIME 2026 94.5.
Top use-case fit
RAG
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Agents
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Long context
Included by capability and metadata signals in the decision map.
Provider price ladder
| Provider | Input / 1M | Output / 1M | Route |
|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Foundry | - | - | ServerlessPartial |
Capabilities
Benchmark peer barsfor RAG
No task-mapped benchmark peers are available for this model yet.
Benchmark scores(2)
Migration checks
No linked migration route is available for this model yet.