Mustafa Suleyman spent 9 months preparing Microsoft's pursuit of superintelligence

Mustafa Suleyman, Microsoft's first-ever AI CEO, has revealed details of the company's large-scale strategic turn: the race for superintelligence became part of his personal plan almost nine months before the general public learned of it.

In March 2026, Microsoft carried out a major internal restructuring. As part of it, Suleyman handed off some of his operational duties and focused on what he himself calls the main goal: achieving superintelligence. Officially, the shift became possible after the company renegotiated its contract with OpenAI, but Suleyman admits he had been preparing for it before the updated agreement was signed. "This is a long-gestating plan," he told The Verge.

Who is Mustafa Suleyman?

He co-founded DeepMind, a lab later acquired by Google, and then founded Inflection AI, a startup building a new generation of personal AI assistants. In 2024, Microsoft hired Suleyman away together with Inflection's core team and created a special role for him: the corporation's first-ever AI CEO.

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

The renegotiation of the OpenAI contract that Suleyman mentions became a bifurcation point. Microsoft kept access to its partner's technology but at the same time freed up room for its own superintelligence research. According to Suleyman, it was this agreement that "unlocked" the corporation's ability to go its own way.

What does "superintelligence" mean in Microsoft's mouth?

For Suleyman, it 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 the human level. In a corporate context, that means above all commercial applications: AI agents, automation of complex workflows, faster scientific discovery, and new service layers on top of Azure.

The March 2026 restructuring was the organizational reflection of this course. By handing off part of his day-to-day duties, Suleyman freed up space for the strategic level: building key partnerships, recruiting top researchers, and shaping a long-term technical agenda that goes beyond distributing OpenAI's products.

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