MAI-Image-2.6
Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.6 creates and edits pictures from text descriptions, offered to developers online rather than as a download.
Key facts
- Released
- Sep 4, 2026
- What it does
- Makes images: Creates pictures from a description, or edits them.
View moreView less
- How
- For developers, through an API
- Announced as
- “Pushing the quality-cost frontier with MAI-Image-2.6”
From trckr's archive of releases before it started watching. Date and details from Epoch AI's database of AI models (CC BY 4.0).
How it scores
From independent testers, never the lab's own claims.
- Pictures, by people's votes#6 of 78
- GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst1,428
- 2GPT-Image-2.6 Sunburst1,406
- 5GPT Image 21,382
- 6MAI-Image-2.61,330
- 7Gemini Nano Banana 2.11,328
Source: LMArena · LMArena text-to-image
Compare MAI-Image-2.6 with
It came out 43 days after MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, the lab's previous model.
The details
MAI-Image-2.6 is Microsoft's Image generator: A model that creates or edits pictures from a written description. generation and editing model, accessed through an API: How developers plug a model into their own apps and pay per use. A model that's "in the API" can be used by programmers, even if it isn't in a chat app yet. and not released as a download.
Get alerts like this the moment they happen.
From Microsoft and every other major lab.