Mustafa Suleiman Spent 9 Months Preparing for Microsoft's Superintelligence Push

Mustafa Suleiman, Microsoft's first-ever CEO for AI, revealed details of the company's sweeping strategic shift: the race for superintelligence became part of his personal plan nearly nine months before the broader public learned about it. In March 2026, Microsoft conducted a major internal restructuring. Within it, Suleiman transferred some operational duties and focused on what he calls the main goal — achieving superintelligence. The transition officially became possible after reviewing the company's contract with OpenAI, but Suleiman himself admits he was preparing for it even before signing the updated agreement. "This is a long-held plan," he told The Verge.

Who is Mustafa Suleiman? He became a co-founder of DeepMind — a laboratory later acquired by Google — then founded Inflection AI, a startup developing next-generation personal AI assistants. In 2024, Microsoft poached Suleiman along with a key team from Inflection and created a special position for him — the company's first-ever CEO for AI.

His arrival coincided with an era when Microsoft was betting primarily on partnership with OpenAI. The company invested tens of billions of dollars in its partner and integrated ChatGPT and subsequent models into its entire product stack — from Azure to Office 365. However, over time, the relationship between the two companies grew more complicated: OpenAI is actively building its own infrastructure and seeking independence from the cloud provider.

The renegotiation of the OpenAI contract that Suleiman mentions became a bifurcation point. Microsoft retained access to its partner's technologies, but simultaneously freed up space for its own research in the field of superintelligence. According to Suleiman, this agreement "unlocked" the corporation's ability to forge its own path.

What stands behind the word "superintelligence" in Microsoft's terms? For Suleiman, this is not an abstract scientific dream. In his book "The Coming Wave," he described superintelligence as systems capable of independently solving a broad class of tasks at or above human level. In a corporate context, this primarily means commercial applications: AI agents, automation of complex workflows, acceleration of scientific discoveries, new service layers on top of Azure.

The March 2026 restructuring became an organizational reflection of this course. By transferring some of his current responsibilities, Suleiman freed up space for the strategic level: building key partnerships, attracting top researchers, shaping a long-term technical agenda that goes beyond distributing OpenAI products.

For the entire industry, this is an important signal. Microsoft — a company with a strong research laboratory in MSR, massive computing infrastructure in Azure, and years of experience working with enterprise clients worldwide — openly declares claims to its own place in the first tier of the race for superintelligence, alongside Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and OpenAI itself. Nine months of preparation — this is not a reaction to trends, but a strategic game for the long term.