Microsoft releases Decision-1, a 9B model that scores answer options

Microsoft-Decision-1 is post-trained from Alibaba's Qwen3.5-9B and returns a calibrated probability for each fixed answer option instead of generated text. It targets routing, classification, verification and agent control, and is available in Microsoft Foundry and OpenRouter.

Why it matters: Following Liquid AI's d1 models, this suggests decision-scoring models are becoming a distinct category. Small, cheap models that make the routing and verification calls in agent pipelines could cut cost and latency versus asking a large generative model each time.