Microsoft is dropping a family of seven new AI models, the company announced on Tuesday during the opening keynote of Build, its annual developer conference. The blockbuster highlight is the 35-billion-parameter MAI-Thinking-1, which Microsoft AI lead Mustafa Suleyman described onstage during the keynote as Microsoft’s “first reasoning model,” and said that independent early testers “prefer it in overall quality, side-by-side, versus [Anthropic’s Claude] Sonnet 4.6.” MAI-Thinking-1 also scored 97% on the AIME benchmark, which measures advanced mathematical and problem-solving abilities, and “most importantly of all,” a 53% on SWE Bench Pro, which measures the ability of AI agents to handle complex coding tasks. Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 currently scores at 51.9%, but OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 has achieved a 59.1% score, according to data from Scale Labs, the model performance tracking division of Scale AI. The big selling point was that MAI-Image-1 was trained “entirely from the bottom,” as Suleyman put it.…