Microsoft Surges Ahead in AI Image Generation with MAI-Image-2.5 Pro

Microsoft has quietly shipped its strongest image model yet, MAI-Image-2.5 Pro, which has climbed to No. 2 on Arena's Image Edit leaderboard ahead of Google's Nano Banana 2.

The model is designed for teams that need controllable and consistent edits rather than just pretty text-to-image outputs. It is built as a developer-facing model inside Microsoft Foundry, the company's unified platform for deploying and calling first-party and partner AI models.

MAI-Image-2.5 Pro is available directly through Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry) and is currently free to use with a budget of at least $10-20 in Azure credit for testing.