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Microsoft AI: MAI-Image-2.6 Flash

microsoft/mai-image-2.6-flash

BenchmarksCompare

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash is the lower-latency, lower-cost member of the MAI-Image-2.6 family from Microsoft AI, built for latency-sensitive, high-throughput production image generation and editing at comparable quality to the precision tier. It supports the same multi-reference editing with up to five input images and the same fixed or model-chosen aspect ratios.

Modalities

In / Out Price

$2.50 / $19per 1M

Context

4K

Released

Sep 4, 2026

BenchmarksCompare
PlaygroundProvidersPricingPerformanceUptimeBenchmarksAppsActivityFAQExplore

Playground

Providers

This model is hosted by one provider. OpenRouter forwards every request to it directly — no routing decisions to make.

Pricing

The average price customers actually pay for this model, next to the prices providers post. Caching and discounts mean the price actually paid is often well below the listed one.

Performance

Throughput is how fast the model writes (tokens per second — higher is better). Latency is total round-trip time (lower is better). TTFT is time-to-first-token — how long before you see anything appear (lower is better).

Uptime

Uptime is the percentage of the past 3 days that at least one provider was responding to requests. Availability is the percentage of time that inference was successfully served. OpenRouter continuously monitors and uses the next-best provider when one returns an error.

Benchmarks

Scores on standardized evaluations. Higher percentages are better — and rank percentile shows where this model lands among all models on OpenRouter.

Benchmark score summary for Microsoft AI: MAI-Image-2.6 Flash (Design Arena)
SourceBenchmarkScore
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Flash Models Arena Graphic Design Elo1316
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Flash Models Arena Image Elo1304
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Flash Models Arena Imageediting Elo1266
Design ArenaMAI-Image-2.6 Flash Models Arena Logo Elo1269

Apps

Public apps that send the most traffic to this model. Good signal for what real production workloads look like — and a hint at which use cases this model is best suited for.

Activity

Token volume and request traffic to this model over time.

Quick Start

Drop-in code to call this model. OpenRouter's API is OpenAI-compatible — most SDKs work by just swapping the base URL. The only thing that changes between models is the model slug below.

Explore more models

AI Models with Vision: Multimodal LLMs for Image UnderstandingCollectionImage Generation ModelsCollectionImage Model RankingsRanking
$1.75$2.50$19.0011.49s
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End-to-end latency

11.49s

P50, best provider

Uptime (3d)The model was reachable. Request routed to a provider.

100.00%

Availability (3d)The model returned inference from any provider. Errors and empty responses count against it.

99.41%

Availability over the last 3 days

Last 72 hours
Availability 99.41%
3 Days Ago2 Days AgoYesterdayNow

Availability over the last 24 hours

OpenRouter Availability
99.81%

When an error occurs in an upstream provider, we can recover by routing to another healthy provider, if your request filters allow it. You can access per-provider uptime data programmatically through the Endpoints API. Learn more about our load balancing and customization options.

Frequently asked questions

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash is the lower-latency, lower-cost member of the MAI-Image-2.6 family from Microsoft AI, built for latency-sensitive, high-throughput production image generation and editing at comparable quality to the precision tier. It supports the same multi-reference editing with up to five input images and the same fixed or model-chosen aspect ratios.

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash costs $1.75/M tokens for Text Input, $2.50/M tokens for Image Input, and $19.00/M tokens for Image Output.

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash supports the 1:1, 4:3, 3:4, 16:9, 9:16, 3:2 and 1 more aspect ratios.

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash accepts text and images as input and returns images. Up to 5 reference images can be attached to one request for image editing.

MAI-Image-2.6, MAI-Image-2.5 Pro, and MAI-Image-2.5 are other image models from Microsoft.

MAI-Image-2.6 Flash was released on September 4, 2026.