Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.6-Preview lands at #1 on the Artificial Analysis Image Editing Leaderboard and takes #2 in Text to Image MAI-Image-2.6 is the newest model in Microsoft AI's MAI-Image family, announced August 10. Microsoft highlights stronger text rendering, better portraits and 3D imagery, and more polished commercial and photorealistic outputs. Like the MAI-Image-2.5 family, it handles both text to image generation and image editing. In the Artificial Analysis Image Arena, MAI-Image-2.6-Preview debuts at #1 on the Image Editing Leaderboard, ahead of Microsoft's own MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, Reve 2.1, and OpenAI's GPT Image 2, and giving Microsoft the top two spots on the board. In Text to Image it takes #2, behind only OpenAI's GPT Image 2 and ahead of Reve 2.1. On our refreshed Text to Image taxonomy, MAI-Image-2.6-Preview takes the top spot on 5 of the 19 category leaderboards (Material, Knowledge, Frontier, Retail & Ecommerce, and Marketing & Advertising), ahead of GPT Image 2, which leads every other category. MAI-Image-2.6 extends a rapid run of strong image releases from Microsoft AI. MAI-Image-2.5 debuted at #2 in Text to Image in June. MAI-Image-2.5-Pro, launched July 23, took #1 in Image Editing when we published our results last week. MAI-Image-2.6 now takes that top spot from its own sibling, and sits at #2 in Text to Image against MAI-Image-2.5-Pro's #8. MAI-Image-2.6 is available in the MAI Playground and in Private Preview on Microsoft Foundry. Congratulations to @MicrosoftAI on the release! See below for our analysis of MAI-Image-2.6-Preview and other leading models in the Artificial Analysis Image Arena 🧵