Microsoft Taps Alibaba Cloud Model for New Decision AI
AI-generated image · US National Wire
The software giant's Microsoft-Decision-1 relies on Chinese-developed Qwen3.5-9B as it enters a crowded market of probability-based decision models.
Microsoft has entered the race for specialized decision models with the launch of Microsoft-Decision-1, according to reporting from The Register. Unlike standard large language models designed for reasoning or text generation, these models provide structured outputs for software to act upon, focusing on classification and decision-making at a lower cost.
Microsoft-Decision-1 is currently based on Qwen3.5-9B, a model developed by Alibaba Cloud, the cloud computing division of the Chinese tech giant Alibaba. While Microsoft has not disclosed the reasons for this architectural choice, the company stated it intends to soon rebase the model using its own proprietary technology and models from OpenAI.
Achint Srivastava, VP of software engineering in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft, noted in a blog post that cost is a primary factor for users of agentic AI, emphasizing the need to select the specific model suited for a particular task. Microsoft claims Microsoft-Decision-1 is more than 20x cheaper than OpenAI's GPT-6 Sol for text classification, with input tokens priced at $0.042 per million and free output tokens.
Microsoft's move comes as a surge of competitors launch similar tools. The Register notes that more than 100 such models are now competing, including Jev from TypeSafe AI, OpenAI's Decisions API, Cloudflare's Clef, Liquid AI's d1, and H2O.ai's H2O-Lightning-4B—the latter of which is also built on a Qwen model (Qwen3.5-4B). Other entrants include Perplexity, Snowflake, and Strands with its Strands Decider 2B. Microsoft-Decision-1 is available via Microsoft Foundry and will soon be offered through OpenRouter.