Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.5 ranks #2 in Image Edit Arena

Microsoft AI's image model "MAI-Image-2.5" has landed at #2 in the "Image Edit Arena (Single-Image Edit)" with a score of 1401, behind only OpenAI's "gpt-image-2 (medium)." Announced by Arena.ai, which runs the evaluation, on June 2, 2026, the company said that "at its price tier, no model scores higher on Arena," noting that it advances the "Pareto frontier" representing the optimal balance of performance and cost (Arena official post).

According to Arena.ai, MAI-Image-2.5 scored 1401 (±8, preliminary) over 5,625 matchups in the single-image edit category, pulling more than 10 points ahead of Google's "Nano Banana 2," xAI's "Grok Imagine," and OpenAI's "ChatGPT-Image-Latest-High Fidelity" (Arena detail post, Image Edit leaderboard). The top spot belongs to "gpt-image-2 (medium)" at 1466, leaving only a narrow gap to the leader.

The model was originally unveiled on May 26, 2026, as a text-to-image model, debuting at #3 in the Text-to-Image Arena with a score of 1254 (±8). That marked a +72-point improvement over the previous MAI-Image-2, drawing attention as a sign of rapid progress (Morphic, Microsoft AI official). Following its text-to-image showing, it has now broken into the upper ranks in image editing as well.