Ilya Sutskever becomes CEO of Safe Superintelligence after Meta poached Daniel Gross

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever said he will assume the CEO role at Safe Superintelligence, the artificial intelligence startup he launched last year.

Sutskever's announcement on Thursday comes after Meta poached Daniel Gross, a longtime entrepreneur and AI investor who had been CEO of Safe Superintelligence.

In a post on X, Sutskever said Gross' time at the company has been "winding down," and that his last day was June 29. Safe Superintelligence co-founder Daniel Levy will now serve as president, and the company's technical team will continue to report to Sutskever, he said.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been on a multibillion-dollar AI hiring spree, highlighted by a $14 billion investment in Scale AI that brought the startup's founder Alexandr Wang and a small group of his lead engineers to Meta.

Zuckerberg announced a new organization on Monday called Meta Superintelligence Labs that's made up of top AI researchers and engineers. However, Gross' name was not listed among the new hires mentioned by Zuckerberg.

Gross did not respond to CNBC's request for comment.

During Zuckerberg's AI hiring blitz, Meta tried to acquire Safe Superintelligence, but Sutskever rebuffed those efforts, CNBC previously reported. Safe Superintelligence was reportedly valued at $32 billion in a fundraising round in April.

Sutskever confirmed his plans on Thursday to keep running the company as an independent organization.

"⁠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," Sutskever wrote. "We have the compute, we have the team, and we know what to do. Together we will keep building safe superintelligence."

Sutskever previously served as OpenAI's chief scientist and co-led the company's Superalignment team with Jan Leike, who left to join rival AI firm Anthropic.

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