Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Ilya Sutskever announced on 14 May 2024 that he was leaving OpenAI, six months after voting with its board to remove Sam Altman, for "a project that is very personally meaningful to me." On 19 June he, Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy named it. Gross had sold his search startup Cue to Apple and run AI projects there before becoming a Y Combinator partner and an investor; Levy had led OpenAI's optimization team. Gross became chief executive.

The founding statement, still the company's homepage, was a single short page. "Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time," it began. "We have started the world's first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe superintelligence." It said the company would "advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead," so that "we can scale in peace," and that its business model would keep "safety, security, and progress" insulated "from short-term commercial pressures." It described SSI as "an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv" and asked for "a lean, cracked team" of engineers and researchers.

Sutskever told Bloomberg that the safety he meant was engineering safety: "By safe, we mean safe like nuclear safety as opposed to safe as in 'trust and safety.'" The announcement did not say how SSI would earn money or what technical approach it would take, and the company has kept both largely private since.

In September 2024 the ten-person company announced 1 billion dollars from NFDG (Gross's fund with Nat Friedman), Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, DST Global and SV Angel, at a valuation that people close to the deal put at 5 billion dollars. Gross said investors had to support "a straight shot to safe superintelligence and in particular to spend a couple of years doing R&D on our product before bringing it to market." Sutskever explained the new venture as "a mountain that's a bit different from what I was working on," and questioned the scaling program he had championed at OpenAI: "Everyone just says scaling hypothesis. Everyone neglects to ask, what are we scaling?" Three months later he told the NeurIPS conference that "pre-training as we know it will unquestionably end" because the supply of internet text was running out.

Investors kept coming. In February 2025 TechCrunch reported that Greenoaks was leading a round at a 30 billion dollar valuation, and in April reports put the finished round at 2 billion dollars and a 32 billion dollar valuation, with Alphabet and Nvidia also backing the company; SSI did not comment. On 9 April 2025 Google Cloud announced that SSI was using its TPU chips for research, and a source told TechCrunch that Google Cloud was SSI's primary computing provider.

In June 2025, during Mark Zuckerberg's hiring drive for what became Meta Superintelligence Labs, CNBC reported, citing unnamed sources, that Meta had recently tried to acquire SSI, that Sutskever had rebuffed both the offer and an attempt to hire him, and that Zuckerberg had then negotiated with Gross instead. Meta hired Gross and Friedman and took a stake in their fund.

Gross's last day was 29 June. On 3 July Sutskever wrote to staff and investors: "I am now formally CEO of SSI, and Daniel Levy is President. The technical team continues to report to me." He added, "You might have heard rumors of companies looking to acquire us. We are flattered by their attention but are focused on seeing our work through," and "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do." Gross wrote that the company's "future is very bright, and I expect miracles to follow." In January 2026 Gross became co-leader of Meta Compute, Meta's data center buildout.

The two accounts of the split differ in emphasis. Asked in November 2025 whether a co-founder's exit meant SSI lacked breakthroughs, Sutskever said the company had been raising money at a 32 billion dollar valuation when "Meta came in and offered to acquire us, and I said no. But my former cofounder in some sense said yes." He said Gross had gained "a lot of near-term liquidity" and was "the only person from SSI to join Meta."

Sutskever's interview with Dwarkesh Patel on 25 November 2025 is the fullest account of SSI's plans. He said SSI had raised 3 billion dollars and that this bought more research compute than it seemed, because rivals spend much of theirs on serving products; that "we are squarely an 'age of research' company"; that its distinguishing feature was "a different technical approach"; and that the question of how SSI would make money would "reveal itself." Asked whether SSI still planned to go straight to superintelligence, he answered, "Maybe," naming two reasons to change course: timelines might prove long, and there was value in powerful AI "being out there impacting the world." Even in the straight-shot case, he said, "Gradualism would be an inherent component of any plan."

On 27 July 2026 Nvidia and SSI announced a long-term partnership that gives SSI access to Nvidia's Vera Rubin platform and, in SSI's words, lets it "scale our compute by 10x." Nvidia said it had entered the deal "after obtaining rare access into the company's closely guarded research," and Bloomberg reported Nvidia's investment at 5 billion dollars. "We have research that is worthy of scaling up," Sutskever said. In early August investor Gavin Baker said on a podcast that "SSI says that they'll come out with their model in August." SSI never confirmed that, and as of late September 2026 its updates page listed no release after the Nvidia partnership.