Breaking

Microsoft MAI-Image-2.6 Holds No. 2 on Arena Text-to-Image at 1,331 Points as Foundry Preview Ends

September 4, 2026 at 14:01 EDT

Foundation Models
Media Generation

Microsoft’s MAI-Image-2.6 sits at No. 2 on the Arena text-to-image leaderboard with 1,331 points and has moved onto the quality-cost Pareto frontier, priced at $38.90 per 1,000 output images, or about $0.039 per image. Independent evaluators say the model now outperforms Grok Imagine Image 2.0 on that board while costing less, and Microsoft has taken the model out of preview for developers on Microsoft Foundry.

September 4, 2026 · Microsoft AI

MAI-Image-2.6 holds Arena No. 2 — cheaper than Grok, still behind GPT Image 2

The flagship image model scores 1,331 text-to-image points at $38.90 per 1,000 outputs (~$0.039 per image), joining the quality-cost Pareto frontier as Foundry access leaves preview.

Text-to-image Arena rank

1,331

Arena points (T2I)

$0.039

Per output image (list)

+79

Elo vs MAI-Image-2.5 at launch

Launch Elo climb (text-to-image)

Same unit: Arena points. Column height is proportional to score.

1,256 pts

MAI-Image-2.5
(No. 10)

1,331 pts

MAI-Image-2.6
(No. 2)

Debut snapshot was 1,336 pts; the live board now reads 1,331.

Where it ranks by category

Text-to-image standings after the September 4 update.

No. 2 Product & branding No. 2 3D imaging No. 2 Anime & fantasy No. 2 Art No. 2 Text rendering No. 3 Portraits No. 3 Photoreal & cinematic

What production teams like

Frontier quality near $0.04 per image, Foundry plus Playground access, and a Flash sibling Microsoft says is 2.8× faster than GPT-Image-2-Medium.

What still limits it

GPT Image 2 still leads text-to-image. Token use can push edits to ~$0.048 per image. Live Elo will keep moving.

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