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

Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman은 Microsoft Build 2026에서 약 6개월 전 OpenAI와의 계약 변경으로 Microsoft가 자체 연구진, 데이터 파이프라인, custom silicon을 활용해 초지능을 공식적으로 추진할 권한을 얻었다고 밝혔습니다. Microsoft는 OpenAI와의 협력을 유지하면서도 reasoning, code generation, image creation, transcription, voice synthesis를 포괄하는 7종의 자체 개발 MAI 모델군을 공개했습니다.

이번 발언은 Microsoft의 AI 전략이 OpenAI 의존형 파트너십에서 자체 모델·인프라를 병행하는 이중 트랙으로 이동하고 있음을 보여줍니다. 장기적으로는 Copilot과 enterprise AI 제품군에서 모델 선택권과 비용 구조를 Microsoft가 더 직접 통제하게 되며, Big Tech 간 자체 LLM 및 custom silicon 경쟁도 한층 심화될 가능성이 큽니다.

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. To the outside world, Microsoft's AI strategy was OpenAI.Mustafa Suleyman wants to change that narrative.In an exclusive sit-down interview with VentureBeat at Microsoft Build 2026, the CEO of Microsoft AI 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."We were only sort of set free from our contract with OpenAI about six months ago to formally pursue superintelligence," Suleyman said. "So this is very early days."The comment, delivered matter-of-factly backstage at the Fort Mason Center here, 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 signals a new level of AI ambitionThe most tangible evidence of that shift arrived the same day. Microsoft announced 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 one point repeatedly: the model was trained from scratch on clean, commercially licensed data, without distillation from third-party frontier models — a direct, if unstated, contrast to the widespread industry practice of using outputs from competitors' systems to train cheaper alternatives."We train our reasoning models from scratch," Suleyman wrote in a blog post accompanying the announcement. "We don't distill from other labs and we don't rely on unlicensed or opaque data."The rest of the family fills out a multimodal portfolio designed for enterprise deployment: MAI-Code-1-Flash, a lightweight coding model built specifically for GitHub Copilot and VS Code; MAI-Image-2.5, which supports both text-to-image and image editing; MAI-Transcribe-1.5, which Microsoft claims is the most accurate transcription model available, operating across 43 languages; and MAI-Voice-2, a multilingual speech-generation system. All of the models ship through Microsoft Foundry, the company's model-hosting and deployment infrastructure, and for the first time, developers can tune model weights themselves through third-party platforms including OpenRouter, Fireworks, and Baseten.But Suleyman made clear in the interview 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."What "set free" from OpenAI actually means for Microsoft's AI futureTo 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. As Fortune and Axios reported in November, 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 at the time, was a "best-of-both environment, where we're free to pursue our own superintellige