Microsoft releases Decision-1: a model that answers with the probability of a choice rather than text, priced at $0.042 per million input tokens
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Fast, cheap models that pick an option instead of writing text are becoming an ordinary tool for steering agents.
Microsoft-Decision-1 is a "decision model" for classification, evaluation and agent routing: given a question with fixed options, it returns calibrated probabilities. The model is post-trained on the open Qwen3.5-9B from China's Alibaba Cloud; Microsoft promises to move to its own MAI models and OpenAI models in later versions. Microsoft states that across 36 benchmarks (about 150,000 questions) it achieved the highest accuracy, 83.5%, and runs 2.5 times faster than the nearest rival, H2O-Lightning-4B, and, according to 3DNews, 35 times faster than GPT-6 Sol; input costs $0.042 per million tokens and output is free. It is available in Microsoft Foundry, and on OpenRouter either already or soon, depending on the source. According to The Decoder, decision models from OpenAI, Cloudflare and Jev are already on the market.