Microsoft Moves Toward AI Self-Sufficiency Amid Evolving OpenAI Ties
The company is also investing heavily in healthcare AI and what it calls “humanist superintelligence,” emphasizing systems designed to remain under human control.
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Microsoft is rethinking its AI strategy, signaling a move toward what its AI chief Mustafa Suleyman calls “true self-sufficiency.” In an interview with the Financial Times, Suleyman said the company is accelerating development of its own frontier models, reducing long-term dependence on OpenAI even as the two companies maintain a deep financial and technical partnership.
The shift follows an October 2025 restructuring of Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI, in which intellectual property rights for models and products were extended through 2032, including post-AGI systems under defined safety guardrails. The revised agreement also grants OpenAI greater flexibility to pursue external investors and infrastructure partners. While Microsoft retains a significant stake in OpenAI — having invested more than $13 billion — the new framework appears to reflect a strategic decoupling at the model layer.
Suleyman, who joined Microsoft in 2024 after co-founding Google DeepMind, described the company’s ambition to build frontier “foundation models” trained on gigawatt-scale compute with globally competitive research teams. The objective is not merely redundancy, but control over the full AI stack — from datasets and training infrastructure to deployment in enterprise workflows.
This vertical integration strategy positions Microsoft to capture a larger share of enterprise AI demand. Suleyman characterized the goal as developing “professional grade AGI”: systems capable of automating routine knowledge work across legal, financial, marketing, and administrative domains. He suggested that significant portions of white-collar workflows could be automated within 12 to 18 months, with AI agents becoming increasingly autonomous and better integrated into institutional systems over the next several years.
The strategy unfolds amid intensifying competition. Anthropic has gained traction in AI-assisted coding, while OpenAI and Alphabet continue expanding enterprise offerings. Meanwhile, Microsoft expects capital expenditure to reach $140 billion this fiscal year as it scales AI infrastructure — a level of investment that has fueled investor concern about potential overextension in the AI cycle.
Beyond enterprise productivity, Suleyman emphasized healthcare as a priority, pointing to ambitions around “medical superintelligence” to address workforce shortages and system inefficiencies. At the same time, he framed Microsoft’s long-term objective as building “humanist superintelligence” — systems explicitly designed to remain under human control.
