Microsoft AI chief says company was “set free” from OpenAI to pursue superintelligence
Microsoft AI chief says company was “set free” from OpenAI to pursue superintelligence
Publish Date: 2026-06-05 18:55:00
Source Domain: venturebeat.com
For three years, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence story has been inseparable from OpenAI. The partnership — cemented by a cumulative investment exceeding $13 billion — gave Microsoft early access to the most advanced AI models on the planet, catapulting its Copilot products into the enterprise mainstream and adding hundreds of billions of dollars to its market capitalization. To the outside world, Microsoft’s AI strategy was OpenAI.
Mustafa Suleyman wants to change that narrative.
In an exclusive sit-down interview with VentureBeat at Microsoft Build 2026, the CEO of Microsoft AI disclosed that a contractual change with OpenAI roughly six months ago granted his division the formal authority to pursue what he openly calls “superintelligence” — using Microsoft’s own researchers, its own data pipelines, and its own custom silicon.
“We were only sort of set free from our contract with OpenAI about six months ago to formally pursue superintelligence,” Suleyman said. “So this is very early days.”
The comment, delivered matter-of-factly backstage at the Fort Mason Center here, offers the clearest signal yet of a strategic inflection point unfolding inside the world’s most valuable public company. Microsoft is not abandoning OpenAI. But it is building something alongside it — and, eventually, something that could stand entirely on its own.
Microsoft’s first in-house model family signals a new level of AI ambition
The most tangible evidence of that shift arrived the same day. Microsoft announced a family of seven new AI models developed entirely in-house by its AI Superintelligence Team, spanning reasoning, code generation, image creation, transcription, and voice synthesis. The models — branded under the “MAI” family name — are Microsoft’s most ambitious first-party AI release to date.
The flagship, MAI-Thinking-1, is a 35-billion-active-parameter reasoning model that Microsoft says matches leading models in its weight class on key software engineering…
