# Microsoft launches Decision-1, a hosted model for scoring options, built on Alibaba's open Qwen3.5-9B

Canonical page: https://technooptimist.io/stories/microsoft-launches-decision-1-a-hosted-model-for-scoring-options-built-a5f4d1d2
Date: 9 Oct 2026
About: [Microsoft](https://technooptimist.io/companies/microsoft.md)
Original source: https://kingy.ai/news/microsoft-decision-1-ai-model/

Microsoft has launched Microsoft-Decision-1, a model built to score a fixed set of options rather than write long text. Given a question, context and candidate answers, it returns probabilities in a structured form that software can act on, for tasks such as classification, ranking and routing. Microsoft further trained Alibaba's open-weight Qwen3.5-9B for the job, and the model is offered as a hosted service with its weights not distributed.

## Key facts

- Available in public preview through Microsoft Foundry, with OpenRouter named as another access route; input tokens cost $0.042 per million and output tokens carry no separate charge.
- Microsoft says it is 2.5 times faster than H2O-Lightning-4B in median latency and has the highest accuracy across 36 benchmarks; these are its own internal results.
- The model is built for structured decisions and is not shown to beat general-purpose models on writing, research, coding or complex reasoning.
- Microsoft says future versions may use other foundations, including models from Microsoft AI and OpenAI.
- The article notes that a model judging another model's output needs testing, and that the cost per decision depends on request size.

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