Who's who · Frontier labs
Microsoft AI
Microsoft's in-house AI division, led by Mustafa Suleyman, which builds the MAI models.
At a glance
- Founded
- March 2024
- Based in
- Redmond, United States
- People
- Mustafa Suleyman, Executive vice president and chief executive, Microsoft AI
- Known for
- MAI-Thinking-1, MAI-Code-1.1-Flash, MAI-Transcribe-2, MAI-Voice-2.1
- Funding
- Part of Microsoft (Public: NASDAQ MSFT)
- Parent
- Microsoft
- Website
- https://microsoft.ai
Microsoft AI is a division of Microsoft created in March 2024, when Mustafa Suleyman, a co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection AI, joined with several Inflection staff. It was first set up to run Copilot and Microsoft's other consumer AI products alongside research.
In November 2025 Suleyman formed the MAI Superintelligence Team, aiming for what he calls humanist superintelligence: very capable AI designed to serve people. In March 2026 Microsoft moved the Copilot product to a separate executive, Jacob Andreou, so that Suleyman could concentrate on building models.
The MAI models give Microsoft its own alternatives to OpenAI's models, which it also uses. At its Build conference in June 2026 the division released seven, including the reasoning model MAI-Thinking-1 and a coding model used in GitHub Copilot, plus image, voice and transcription models. Several have since been updated. They are offered through Microsoft Foundry and other platforms such as OpenRouter.
Sources
- Microsoft, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind and Inflection co-founder, joins Microsoft to lead Copilot, 2024-03-19
- Microsoft, Announcing Copilot leadership update, 2026-03-17
- Microsoft AI, Building a hill-climbing machine: Launching seven new MAI models, 2026-06-02
- CNBC, Microsoft forms superintelligence team under AI chief Suleyman 'to serve humanity', 2025-11-06
Facts last checked 2026-10-02