Microsoft launches Microsoft-Decision-1, a fast decision-scoring model built on Alibaba's Qwen

Microsoft has launched Microsoft-Decision-1, a small model that scores fixed answer options rather than writing text. Satya Nadella announced it on X, saying it delivers top performance on structured decision tasks and is already being tested across Microsoft for incident response, quality control and scientific discovery.

What's the model? Microsoft says it is built for routing, classification, prioritisation, verification and workflow control inside apps and agents. Given a set of options (yes/no, multiple choice, ratings, or rubric grading of AI responses and agent actions), it returns a calibrated probability for each in a single pass. It is available in Microsoft Foundry and through OpenRouter.

Claims and pricing. Microsoft reports the highest accuracy across a 36-benchmark comparison of nearly 150,000 held-out questions, and says it is 4.5 times faster than the runner-up and 35 times faster than GPT-6 Sol. Input is listed at $0.042 per million tokens with no output-token charge. These are Microsoft's own benchmark results.

Context. Microsoft post-trained Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.5-9B to build the model and says it will rebase it on other models, including Microsoft AI (MAI) and OpenAI models. The launch shows how large platforms are using small, cheap models as a control layer for agent workflows.

Source: Microsoft Command Line, Microsoft-Decision-1 · Satya Nadella on X