By Hayden Field
Publication Date: 2026-04-02 14:00:00
Mustafa Suleyman has been preparing for his new job description for a long time. Suleyman is Microsoft’s inaugural CEO of AI, but after the company underwent a large-scale restructuring in mid-March, he’s handed off some duties and shifted focus to chasing superintelligence. Though the news was only made public last month, he tells The Verge, he’d been preparing for the transition for as many as nine months — and though renegotiating Microsoft’s contract with OpenAI is the thing that officially “unlocked [Microsoft’s] ability to pursue superintelligence,” he’d been planning even before the ink was dry.
“This has been a long-held plan,” he said, adding that achieving superintelligence was “purely my focus.”
Superintelligence — along with AGI, or artificial general intelligence — has a vague and shifting definition in the AI industry. For Suleyman, it’s strictly about business and productivity. “Superintelligence is really about, ‘Are these models…
