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AI labs are shipping new models nonstop. Besides being better and faster than their predecessors, every new model isn't guaranteed to be a major step change, despite how the company's PR may wax poetic about them. Model strengths really emerge in context: Where are competitor models lacking or excelling? Which models have outstanding specialties, and which are just catching up to industry standards?
Also: How we test AI at ZDNET
Our Model Release Tracker helps you make sense of where models stand relative to each other, and whether they're worth a deeper look. While we don't test every model or model update on this list, we'll always include the key elements you need to know, along with our hands-on expert test, where applicable. We also include an Expert Score for certain models. Curious about how we test AI? Check out this breakdown of our process.
Here are some of the biggest model releases of 2026 so far and what to know about them. We'll update this list whenever a notable new model arrives.
MAI-Thinking-1
Microsoft AI | June 2, 2026
What it does: At its Build developer conference, Microsoft said that this new 35-billion-parameter model is, unsurprisingly, designed for multi-step agentic tasks. It scored similarly on the SWE Bench Pro benchmark test for coding as Anthropic Opus 4.6. The company also noted that enterprise users can trust this model for any use because it was trained only on clean, commercially safe data -- an important tidbit given mounting AI copyright lawsuits.
Also: Microsoft's first reasoning model is one of 7 AIs just released at Build - what we know so far
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