❯ Microsoft releases decision-scoring model Microsoft-Decision-1, built on an Alibaba open-weight model to answer multiple-choice questions for agents

It scores, it does not writeMicrosoft released Microsoft-Decision-1 on October 9, announced by CEO Satya Nadella on X. According to TestingCatalog, it does not generate open-ended text. It takes a fixed set of options and returns a probability for each, supporting yes/no, multiple-choice and rating questions, and can grade AI responses and agent actions against a rubric. The model is available in Microsoft Foundry at $0.042 per million input tokens, with output tokens free.

The base comes from Alibaba's QwenThe model was post-trained from Qwen3.5-9B, Alibaba’s open-weight model with 9 billion parameters. Microsoft said it will later release versions based on its own MAI models and OpenAI models, without giving a timeline. RuntimeWire said the introductory post was written by Microsoft vice president Achint Srivastava, who previously co-founded AI evaluation company Pi Labs.

35x faster than GPT-6 Sol in Microsoft's own testsMicrosoft said the model had the highest accuracy across 36 benchmarks covering nearly 150,000 questions and was 35 times faster than GPT-6 Sol at median latency. These are Microsoft’s own results and have not been verified by third parties. Microsoft also said Xbox Research used it to categorize more than 10,000 pieces of player feedback with quality comparable to GPT-6 Sol at 200 times lower cost.

A traffic light for agentsMicrosoft positions it as a low-cost control layer in agent systems. At every step an agent has to decide whether to continue, retry, switch tools or hand off to a person. Having a large model make those calls is slow and expensive; with a dedicated small model, developers can add a check at every step without worrying about the bill. It handles only text and fixed options and cannot replace the large models that do the reasoning and generation.

▮ SIGNALThe model that runs most often in an agent system is not necessarily the strongest one; routing, review and scoring are being handed to cheap, specialized small models.