Microsoft AI chief says company was 'set free' from OpenAI to pursue superintelligence

["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. But Mustafa Suleyman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, wants to change that narrative.

In an exclusive interview with VentureBeat at Microsoft Build 2026, Suleyman 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.", "The comment, delivered matter-of-factly backstage at the Fort Mason Center, 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, announced the same day, signals a new level of AI ambition.

The company unveiled 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 benchmarks and demonstrates advanced mathematical reasoning. Suleyman emphasized that the model was trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data, without distillation from third-party frontier models — a direct contrast to the widespread industry practice of using outputs from competitors' systems to train cheaper alternatives.", "Suleyman made clear that the seven models are a proof of concept, not a finished product.

The real project is the lab itself. 'Our job is to make sure that when we look out to 2030 and beyond, we have the capacity not just to buy models from third parties, but to build the absolute frontier, the best models in the world,' he said. 'That's a long transition.' To understand what Suleyman means by 'set free,' you need to understand the unusual contractual architecture that has governed Microsoft's AI efforts for years.

When Microsoft invested billions into OpenAI beginning in 2019, the partnership came with a specific arrangement: OpenAI would build the frontier models, and Microsoft would serve as the exclusive cloud provider, integrating those models into its products and reselling them through Azure.", "The deal gave Microsoft extraordinary commercial leverage — access to the world's most advanced AI without having to build it — but it also created a dependency. Microsoft was explicitly barred from pursuing its own AGI research, and the agreement even capped how large a model the company could train, restricting it from building systems beyond a certain computing threshold measured in FLOPS. That arrangement was formally renegotiated, and a revised deal with OpenAI removed those restrictions, clearing the way for Suleyman to launch the MAI Superintelligence Team and pursue what he calls 'humanist superintelligence.'", "The result, in Suleyman's telling, is a 'best-of-both environment, where we're free to pursue our own superintelligence and also work closely with them.' Suleyman does not view the shift as a rupture with OpenAI.