• by Laurie Sullivan , November 6, 2025

Microsoft has formed the MAI Superintelligence team with plans to distance its dependence on OpenAI.

The team is part of the broader Microsoft AI division led by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman. He announced the formation today in a blog post.

Superintelligence is the hypothetical idea that AI systems could potentially become more intelligent than all of humanity.

Microsoft has been integrating offshoots of different types of AI into its advertising and business platforms, and most recently took a 27% stake in OpenAI’s for-profit business after it restructured in October.

“At Microsoft AI, we're working towards Humanist Superintelligence (HSI): incredibly advanced AI capabilities that always work for, in service of, people and humanity more generally,” Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman wrote in a blog post.  

Now free from ties that had bind Microsoft more closely to OpenAI, one of the initial goals for this new team is to target "medical superintelligence," an AI capable of advanced medical diagnosis, as well as make superintelligence safer for all.

Suleyman explained that humanist superintelligence (HSI) offers an alternative vision on “a non-negotiable human-centrism and a commitment to accelerating technological innovation.”

The group, overall, will work toward “advanced AI capabilities that always works for, and in service of, people and humanity.”

A safer superintelligence means the time has come to consider societal boundaries, norms and laws humanity wants around this process. At MAI this is a discussion, and a set of actions, being discussed, which requires real trade-offs and tough decisions that come in environments of immense competitive pressure and also opportunity, he wrote.

Real challenges include security, mindset, structure of the market and the calibration of optimum research paths that steer the course between harnessing positives and avoiding downsides or negatives.

“That's why I'm publishing this – to start a process and to make clear that we are not building a superintelligence at any cost, with no limits,” he wrote. “There's a lot more to say (and of course do) on all of it, and over the next months and years you can expect more from me and MAI to candidly explain and explore our work in this area.”

Thursday’s announcement formalizes a project Microsoft had been working on since March 2025, when the company hired Suleyman and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI.

Microsoft is just the latest company to rebrand and rebuild its advanced AI efforts as it moves further toward superintelligence. These types of systems do not yet exist, but companies like OpenAI and Meta also are working toward superintelligence.

Meta rebranded its AI efforts as Meta Superintelligence Labs in June 2025. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has written in blog posts about his company's work with projects around artificial general intelligence (AGI).