Microsoft AI announced on Oct 27 that MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Image-2.6-Flash are generally available in Microsoft Foundry, with multi-reference editing from up to five images, Bing web grounding, output up to 1.5K and published per-token pricing. The same day its next image editing model, MAI-Image-2.7-Preview, reached #3 overall in Arena's Image Edit leaderboard at 1470 points, 45 points above 2.6; for now it is available only for editing in MAI Playground.
Key Takeaways
- ✓MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Image-2.6-Flash are generally available in Microsoft Foundry, and Microsoft says 2.6 is coming soon to Adobe Firefly
- ✓Official pricing: 2.6 costs $5 text input, $8 image input and $38 image output per 1M tokens; Flash costs $1.75, $2.50 and $19
- ✓2.6 supports multi-reference editing with up to five images, Bing web grounding, dynamic aspect ratios and output up to 1.5K
- ✓Per Arena, MAI-Image-2.7-Preview is #3 overall in Image Edit Arena at 1470 points, 45 points above 2.6 (#7), putting Microsoft AI #2 among labs
- ✓Per Artificial Analysis, 2.7-Preview is #2 on AA-Image-Editing v2.1 and beats 2.6 on all 7 editing actions, ranking #1 on 4 of them
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Background and pain points
For enterprise marketing and design work, the hard part of image generation is rarely the first image. It is keeping products, characters and brand assets consistent across edits while balancing speed and cost. On Oct 27 Microsoft AI announced on X and the official Foundry blog that MAI-Image-2.6 and MAI-Image-2.6-Flash are out of preview and generally available in Microsoft Foundry. The same day its next editing model, MAI-Image-2.7-Preview, climbed third-party leaderboards.
Architecture and mechanism
Per the blog, MAI-Image-2.6 supports multi-reference editing with up to five reference images to keep products, characters and brand assets consistent, web grounding through Bing for prompts that need recent or specific information, dynamic aspect ratios and output up to 1.5K. Microsoft positions 2.6 for precise edits, text rendering and final assets, and Flash for interactive tools, rapid iteration and high-volume generation. Architecture and parameter counts have not been published.
Benchmarks and verification
Per Arena, MAI-Image-2.7-Preview is #3 overall in Image Edit Arena with 1470 points, 45 points above MAI-Image-2.6 at #7, which puts Microsoft AI #2 among labs, and it moved up in every category. Artificial Analysis says it ranks #2 on AA-Image-Editing v2.1, behind OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst (max), and beats 2.6 on all 7 editing actions it measures. These are third-party leaderboard results; Microsoft has not published new quantitative benchmarks for the 2.6 family itself.
Getting started
Official pricing: MAI-Image-2.6 costs $5 per 1M text input tokens, $8 per 1M image input tokens and $38 per 1M image output tokens; Flash costs $1.75, $2.50 and $19. Microsoft suggests exploring and revising with Flash, then switching to 2.6 for final hero assets with text overlays. Both can be deployed from the Foundry model catalog. MAI-Image-2.7-Preview is currently available only for image editing in MAI Playground, with text-to-image coming soon.
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