MAI-Code-1-Flash is now available for GitHub Copilot

[ebndev]

MAI-Code-1-Flash, Microsoft AI’s in-house coding model, is now generally available across GitHub Copilot. Purpose-built for coding and optimized for GitHub Copilot, MAI-Code-1-Flash delivers fast, low-latency responses that make it well-suited for high-volume, iterative agentic coding workflows where speed and efficiency matter most.

This model is billed at provider list pricing under usage-based billing. See Copilot’s pricing for models and requests for details.

Enabling access

Individual users can select the model in the model picker in Visual Studio Code and other supported Copilot surfaces. Copilot Enterprise and Copilot Business plan administrators must enable the MAI-Code-1-Flash policy in Copilot settings before users can access it. See Managing policies and features for Copilot in your enterprise.

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Join the discussion and leave feedback in the comments below!

[Jaimi]

More than interested to try when it comes out. But what about the full fledged Thinking version?

[yanancai]

We are actively working on that, please stay tuned!

[hypestwave]

thanksx

[natestrom]

Definitely looking forward for the new MAI models to land on Business/Enterprise accounts!

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest, we are actively working on a plan to enable preview for Enterprise/Business customers. Will share more once we get a more concrete process of onboarding!

[ctolkien]

+1 for this... given the recent pricing changes, getting token efficient models is now key for Copilot usage.

[ederbond]

Is it going to be available to download and run completely offline on my own hardware with the full fledged Visual Studio 2026 IDE?

If they don't want to lose, even more developers from their ecosystem other platforms, they should either release it public to be downloaded on hugging face to allow us to run it locally on the developer's machine or at least release a full version of it built-in into VS 2026 able to run local and for free. Another option could be a variant of this model that allow at least full agentic programming with .NET only, with the goal do run it locally and Free (at least for .NET) it will be the only effective way to contain the competition to defeat you) you're otherwise the competition might defeat you.

[yanancai]

Thanks for your feedback @ederbond! We are working on our overall open source strategy, so super helpful to hear your desired use cases here! May I ask what kind of hardware you have? Trying to get a sense of the memory footprints.

[ederbond]

@yanancai I have a Dell Mobile Workstation with

• 64GB RAM +
• Intel Core Ultra 9 285H (With an NPU) + an integrated Intel Arch GPU
• Dedicated NVidia RTX 5070 with 8GB VRAM

Which I'm planning to replace by a Surface Laptop Ultra with that amazing NVidia Arm CPU when it gets launched by the end of this year (if the price is reasonably affordable).

[ederbond]

@yanancai talk with @madskristensen (the lead of Visual Studio 2026 team) about the huge benefit it could bring to Microsoft's flagship IDE if these MAI models could be infused inside Visual Studio 2026 to run this family o MAI models, locally in agentic coding mode.
If Microsoft could make it possible, a lot of developers (even from other languages) will jump in, into Visual Studio and the product will become way more attractive if Developers could run AI locally.

[ederbond]

It will help selling more Visual Studio subscriptions, + Windows licenses, + Azure + Surface Hardware and make the entire Microsoft's ecosystem stronger.

[gimlichael]

Sadly, VS 2026 is down prioritized from Microsoft 😞

[francovp]

Why no business or Enterprise? :(

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest, we are actively working on a plan to enable preview for Enterprise/Business customers. Will share more once we get a more concrete process of onboarding!

[spoiledsport]

WHy not Visual Studio?

[drewid]

100%. About to dump tooling due to the 20x-30x increase in costs with GitHub Copilot and this is maybe the only thing that would save it.

[yanancai]

Feedback taken, thanks for sharing this, it helps us prioritize the clients support.

[okasi]

Will it be uploaded to hugging face?

[yanancai]

This model is a close-weight one. We are working on our overall open source strategy, would be interested in hearing your desired use cases here!

[Elefant-Freeciv]

It would be nice if it were open weights, but honestly, even if it were an encrypted blob in visual studio code for local copilot, that would be great.

[mindplay-dk]

Put it up on OpenRouter so we can try it, please - and so we can see how much it really costs.

[OminousIndustries]

Put it up on OpenRouter so we can try it, please - and so we can see how much it really costs.

Agree with this. As far as releases go this one is making it rather difficult to even try the model

[mindplay-dk]

They have the other MAI models (image, voice, transcribe) already up there, so presumably it's coming.

[yanancai]

Thanks for the feedback @mindplay-dk, just to confirm, would you like to use the model via OpenRouter using clients like VS Code? Or connects with other coding agent clients?

[mindplay-dk]

@yanancai not sure why that matters? but I use Pi

[chriddyp]

This is looking great! Would love to try it out and benchmark it in Plotly Studio for data visualization and analytics workflows. Will this be available as an API on Azure or Open Router? Or only integrated in product suites?

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest, we are actively working on a plan to enable preview for Enterprise/Business customers. Will share more once we get a more concrete process of onboarding!

[winter123123]

Why are business/enterprise users not supported?
Costs have already increased due to the shift to a pay-as-you-go model, so why do we have to face this kind of discrimination?
If this is how we are treated, we will stop using the enterprise service.

[drewid]

When can we get this in regular Visual Studio? About to dump tooling due to the 20x-30x increase in costs with GitHub Copilot and this is maybe the only thing that would save it.

[tfukumorikkmic]

I agree.

[yanancai]

Feedback taken, thanks for sharing this, it helps us prioritize the clients support.

[gimlichael]

Eager to try this - I need a replacement for Claude Haiku 4.5 - and this looks like the sweet spot. When will it be available? I am on the Pro+ and already 2 day has passed 🐌

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest! We are still rolling out to model but it should be available to all individual users soon. Thanks for your patience.

[gimlichael]

I had high hopes for this model - especially looking at your benchmark. Sadly, Haiku 4.5 excel compared to this. Hope it will get better though 😞

[erincon01]

I don't see MAI in my ghcopilot business. Is this expected?

[MihailCosmin]

I also don't see it as of 08 June
Is this an US, EU rollout issue ?

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest, we are still gradually rolling out the model to all users and are working on a plan to enable preview for Enterprise/Business customers. Will share more once we get a more concrete process of onboarding!

[eugenenell2021]

When will MAI be available for Enterprise GitHub Copilot? Why are business/enterprise users not supported as yet and how long will it take before we get it?

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest, we are still gradually rolling out the model to all users and are working on a plan to enable preview for Enterprise/Business customers. Will share more once we get a more concrete process of onboarding!

[oduis]

Could it be that "available" just means "for inline code completion", but if never shows up in the models?

[gimlichael]

No - it's literally written that it start with a limited set of users and expand gradually over the coming weeks. Go have a look at YouTube - people lucky enough to get the model are quite pleased with it. And i actually think that Copilot will have value again as I assume Microsoft can provide these models cheap (since they own everything tied to it).

[oduis]

Thanks, just watched the Youtube demo.
Unfortunately, the price is exactly the same as GPT5.4 mini: GitHub Model prices
From the SWE Pro bench MAI-Code-1 and GPT5.4 mini seems to be in the same ballpark, and I found the latter really usable for its size.
I would have hoped for a lower cost one like the Microsoft Raptor model though.

[gimlichael]

At least for me, it looks like a solid replacement for Claude Haiku 4.5 - but time will show 🤞🏼

[yanancai]

Thanks for your interest! We are still gradually rolling out the model to all users. And noted for your feedback on pricing.

[Randalphwa]

I've found that models works best if you use the model to create custom agents -- the way instructions are worded can make a big difference to how well a model works. After having Mai create a custom subagent for editing C++23 code, I had a frontier model look at a fairly complex C++ project of mine and come up with three moderately difficult tasks for agents to create new src/hdr files that required reading and understanding one or more class header files in the project. I use DeepSeek V4 Flash with high thinking as my workhorse since it outperforms Sonnet 4.6 that I used to use. So, I had my frontier model run a V4 Flash thinking model and Mai-Code-1-Flash model with the identical task using each of the custom sub agents written specifically for the model they ran on.

First run, Mai didn't use C++23 standards as instructed, nor did it follow coding practices in the rest of the project. I made some minor tweaks to the custom model instructions, and ran the tasks again and those problems went away. On one of the tasks, the header files were byte-for-byte exactly the same. The logic was identical in all three tasks. Mai was slightly more conservative about pointers, so it wrote a bit more code to prevent using potentially null pointers (in this case the pointers could never be null, but I appreciated the extra caution anyway).

Watching Mai work with the Agent Debug Log up is quite impressive at how fast it calls and processes tools. It is still more expensive to user per task then DeepSeek V4 Flash as long as you don't count your time, or you are able to switch off to a different project so that you can keep working. The 264K context window means it won't run as long as V4 Flash with it's 1 million context window, but as an everyday workhorse, it can certainly keep up with Sonnet, V4 Flash, and GPT-4.1 -- at least in my experience so far.

A caveat to this review is that while throwing some moderately difficult real-world tasks at it is a valid comparison, I have yet to use it enough to truly understand where it's weaknesses are. I also have no idea how well it works with standard VSCode agents versus my highly customized agents -- so that might also be why it's working well for me, and might not work as well for people just using copilot out of the box with no customization.

[eugenenell2021]

So it is being released on more Copilot surfaces, but Business and Enterprise is still coming soon? What is the use waiting this long as by the time it gets to Business and Enterprise its old news and out of date, waiting for upgrade version then?

[OptimusPi]

Does this model break upon having the token "autism" in its context? Please could I test it? ^__^

[cirqueira-labs]

Definitely looking forward for the new MAI models to land on Business/Enterprise accounts!

[Elefant-Freeciv]

To all those mislead by the wealth of articles claiming it is a 5b model, the model is actually a 137a5b more model.

[guhuajun]

Useful for small tasks. But quite slow response in peak hours.

[ctolkien]

[dehlers-cts]

I finally have MAI-Code-1-Flash in my Enterprise account. It became available today. Looking forward to taking it for a spin.

[shibachu]

Is there any data retention for this model and using customer data to learn?

[fractiunate]

For business context we need a clear statement of DRP!

[yanancai]

Update: MAI-Code-1-Flash is now generally available for GitHub Copilot Business and Copilot Enterprise. https://github.blog/changelog/2026-06-26-mai-code-1-flash-for-copilot-business-and-copilot-enterprise/

[riceze]

From my limited experience with this model, it seems it struggles a lot with Plan mode. Prompting in plan mode triggers a infinite-loop-like thinking process that drains credits at an incredible high speed while not producing any real results. I am curious if anyone else is experience this 🤔

[masonreed11]

Great update! Having a fast, low-latency coding model is a welcome addition for everyday development. Looking forward to trying MAI-Code-1-Flash and seeing how it performs in real-world coding workflows. Thanks for sharing!

[v-coder247]

Hi @qapdex-maker, thanks for being a part of the GitHub Community!

In our Community Code of Conduct, we ask that members contribute in a positive and constructive way. This type of post is considered "off topic" as GitHub Community Discussions focuses primarily on topics related to GitHub itself or collaboration on project development and ideas. Any repeat and future violations may result in a temporary or indefinite block from the Community.

We appreciate your understanding.

[guhuajun]

MAI: If you want, I can continue with the next blah-blah-blah.
Hey, MAI, don't be shy, you have a full list of openspec tasks that need to be completed.