Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an AI research company founded by Ilya Sutskever focused solely on building safe superintelligence, with no other products or commercial distractions.
Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an AI research company founded by Ilya Sutskever focused solely on building safe superintelligence, with no other products or commercial distractions.
People
Updated 05/18/26Funding Details
Updated 05/18/26- Annual Budget
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- Current Runway
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- Funding Goal
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- Funding Raised to Date
- $3,000,000,000
Org Details
Updated 05/18/26Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI) is an AI research company founded on June 19, 2024 by Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy. Sutskever, a co-founder and former Chief Scientist of OpenAI, left that organization to pursue what he described as a fundamentally new path to artificial general intelligence. Gross had previously led AI and search efforts at Apple, while Levy is an AI researcher and investor. SSI's entire mission, name, and product roadmap center on a single goal: building superintelligence that is safe. The company explicitly positions itself as 'the world's first straight-shot SSI lab,' committing that its first and only product will be safe superintelligence itself. Unlike other frontier AI labs, SSI does not build or ship intermediate commercial products, which the founders argue allows safety and capability research to proceed without the distorting pressures of revenue cycles or product roadmaps. The company operates with a deliberately small, elite team — approximately 20 researchers and engineers as of mid-2025 — split between offices in Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. SSI treats safety and capabilities as inseparable technical challenges to be solved in tandem through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. SSI raised $1 billion in its first round in September 2024 at a $5 billion valuation, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, and SV Angel. In April 2025, the company raised an additional $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation — a more than sixfold increase in under a year — led by Greenoaks Capital, with further participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Google Cloud also became a major infrastructure partner, providing TPUs for SSI's research. In July 2025, co-founder Daniel Gross departed SSI to join Meta Superintelligence Labs. Following his departure, Ilya Sutskever assumed the CEO role and Daniel Levy became President. As of early 2026, SSI has not released any public products or research publications, maintaining its stealth approach to developing safe superintelligence.
Theory of Change
Updated 05/18/26SSI believes that the primary risk from advanced AI comes from pursuing capabilities while treating safety as secondary or as a constraint on progress. Their theory of change is that by building a small, world-class team that treats safety and capabilities as equally important technical problems to be solved simultaneously — and by completely insulating that work from commercial pressures and product cycles — it is possible to reach superintelligence in a way that is inherently safe rather than retrofitting safety onto a powerful system. Full autonomy from investor pressure to ship products is seen as a prerequisite for this approach to work.
Grants Received– no grants recorded
Updated 05/18/26Projects– no linked projects
Updated 05/18/26Discussion
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