Is Microsoft MAI-Thinking-1 Down?

Quickest ways to check the current status of microsoft.ai plus recent known issues and working alternatives if it's out.

Last editorial review: 2026-06-02

How to check right now

Known issues we've tracked

LAUNCH (2026-06-02, Microsoft Build): MAI-Thinking-1 is the flagship of the 'seven new MAI models' wave (alongside MAI-Code-1-Flash, MAI-Image-2.5 + Flash, MAI-Transcribe-1.5, MAI-Voice-2 + Flash). Microsoft describes it as 'a medium-sized model that stands among the strongest models in its weight class.' Vendor-published: AIME 2025 97.0%, AIME 2026 94.5%, matches leading models on SWE-Bench Pro, and in human-preference testing 'users preferred MAI-Thinking-1 over Claude Sonnet 4.6.' Architecture: 35B-active, ~1T-total sparse Mixture-of-Experts; 256K context; Chat Completions API compatible. Availability: private preview on Microsoft Foundry at launch + GA through OpenRouter / Fireworks / Baseten; MAI Playground public preview coming soon.
2026-06-02Microsoft AI (microsoft.ai/news/introducing-mai-thinking-1/, microsoft.ai/news/building-a-hillclimbing-machine-launching-seven-new-mai-models/)
Self-reported benchmarks pending third-party verification. Microsoft's AIME and SWE-Bench Pro figures and the Sonnet 4.6 preference-win claim are first-party. Treat as vendor numbers until Artificial Analysis / LMArena-style independent confirmation lands (typically 4-8 weeks).
2026-06Microsoft model announcement

Issues here are sourced from our editorial sweeps, not real-time telemetry. Newer issues may exist.

What to use if Microsoft MAI-Thinking-1 is down

Top AIToolTier-ranked alternatives in the same category, ordered by our overall score.

A

Muse Spark (Meta)

8.8

Meta's frontier model line from its Superintelligence Lab -- Muse Spark 1.1 (2026-07-09) adds substantially better coding, 1M-token multi-agent orchestration, and Meta's first paid developer API (Meta Model API, public preview)

A

Claude (Anthropic)

8.5

Anthropic's flagship LLM family. **Claude Opus 5 launched 2026-07-24** and is now the default model on Claude Max and the strongest model on Claude Pro -- same $5/$25 per 1M as Opus 4.8, but Anthropic says it lands within 0.5% of Fable 5 on CursorBench at half the cost. **Sonnet 5's $2/$10 per 1M is now permanent** -- Anthropic cancelled the 2026-09-01 rise to $3/$15 and made the launch rate standard -- and it stays the default on Free/Pro. **Claude Fable 5.1 and Mythos 5.1 launched 2026-09-01** and now top the range -- same $10/$50 per 1M as Fable 5, with the saving delivered entirely through a 4x cheaper cache read ($1 -> $0.25/MTok), so it is 25-45% cheaper only if your workload reuses cached context. **From 2026-08-14 future Claude models watermark their text output globally** (SynthID-Text; no extra tokens, no price or speed change, no identifying information -- detector API not shipped yet), and the **legacy Workbench plus the experimental prompt-tools APIs retired 2026-08-17**

A

Gemini (Google)

8.3

Google's LLM with deep Google Workspace integration, 2M token context window, and native code execution -- **Gemini 3.8 Flash launched 2026-09-02** -- the third Flash release in six weeks -- at the SAME $0.75/$3.75 per 1M intro rate as 3.7 Flash and, critically, **on the same 2026-12-31 expiry** (then $1.50/$7.50), so the discount window did not reset. HLE-Verified 54.9%; Google warns it uses more tokens per task because it 'works harder', so cost per task can rise at an unchanged rate. **Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber** is trusted-defenders-only via the new **Fairwind Program**. Gemini 3.7 Flash (2026-08-13) remains fully supported for efficiency-first work. Gemini 3.5 Pro STILL delayed and partner-testing-only (Bloomberg, 7/16 -- coding shortfalls, no ship date), so Flash keeps shipping while the Pro line stalls. Gemini 4 pre-training underway. **Two new models in Aug 2026: Gemini 3.5 Transcribe (2026-08-26) speech-to-text and Gemini Omni 1.1 Flash (2026-08-27) production video with 40s scene extension, start/end frames and 4K** -- neither shipped with a public rate card

A

MiMo (Xiaomi)

8.3

Xiaomi's MiMo-V2.5 family launched 2026-04-22 -- Pro (1T total / 42B active MoE, 1M context, native vision+audio reasoning), Multimodal base, TTS (3 sub-models: base, VoiceDesign, VoiceClone), and ASR (open-source, English + Chinese + major dialects). Full voice pipeline for the agent era. Extra-charge 1M-context tier removed at launch

A

Hunyuan 3 (Tencent Hy3)

8.1

Tencent's Hy3 reached GA 2026-07-06 (upgraded from the April preview) -- 295B total / 21B active MoE, 256K context, now Apache 2.0 open weights on HuggingFace + ModelScope with the EU/UK/South Korea restriction lifted. ~90% agent-task completion on Tencent's internal apps; API via Tencent Cloud TokenHub. Integrated into Yuanbao, WeChat, QQ

About Microsoft MAI-Thinking-1

Tier B (7.5/10). Microsoft's first in-house reasoning model -- launched 2026-06-02 at Build as the flagship of seven new MAI models. 35B-active / ~1T-total sparse Mixture-of-Experts, 256K context. AIME 2025 97.0%, matches leading models on SWE-Bench Pro, and beat Claude Sonnet 4.6 in human-preference testing. Available on Microsoft Foundry + OpenRouter / Fireworks / Baseten