Microsoft claims a No. 2 Arena finish for MAI-Image-2.6. The leaderboard says otherwise.
Microsoft says MAI-Image-2.6 debuted on Arena and landed second in the text-to-image ranking, with access in MAI Playground and through the API promised for next week.
Public data doesn’t back that up. As of August 10, 2026, second place on the Arena board belongs to grok-imagine-image-2.0, and mai-image-2.5 sits ninth. There’s no separate 2.6 announcement in Microsoft’s public materials either; the second-place finish the company has documented was for MAI-Image-2.5 in the image editing category.
Microsoft did previously open a public preview of MAI-Image-2.5-Pro in Microsoft Foundry and MAI Playground, priced at $106 per 1M output tokens.
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