Microsoft Corp. is pursuing a more powerful form of AI called “superintelligence” it hopes will be capable of making advances in areas like medicine and materials science.

Mustafa Suleyman, chief of the Microsoft AI group, will lead what the company is calling the MAI Superintelligence Team that will target hypothetical milestones that are even more ambitious than artificial general intelligence. That’s the often ambiguous term that outfits like OpenAI use to describe systems capable of demonstrating human-level performance. Previously, Microsoft had agreed not to pursue AGI as part of its partnership with OpenAI.

“If AGI is often seen as the point at which an AI can match human performance at all tasks, then superintelligence is when it can go far beyond that performance,” Suleyman said in a blog post announcing the push, which he says will work toward personal AI companions and breakthroughs in health care and clean energy.

The team will aim to build what he calls Humanist Superintelligence, seeking to avoid potential risks associated with development of powerful automated tools and work for the benefit of people instead of technological milestones.

OpenAI, Meta Platforms Inc. and other companies are also increasingly focusing on superintelligence as the new goalpost for AI development. The term “superintelligence,” like AGI, is imprecise: It’s unclear how capable, exactly, AI needs to be at certain tasks before it crosses the threshold from “general” to “super” intelligence.

The announcement comes in the wake of a renegotiated agreement between Microsoft and OpenAI that determined the software maker’s stake in the startup and altered portions of their relationship. That included removing a prior prohibition on Microsoft’s development of advanced AI tools, which had limited much of the Redmond, Washington-based company’s work to smaller, less broadly capable models than those that power ChatGPT.

Thursday’s announcement formalizes a project that Microsoft had been laying the groundwork for since last March, when the company hired Suleyman and licensed the intellectual property of his startup, Inflection AI.

With a combination of reorganized Microsoft teams and new hires, Suleyman set about building a new family of Microsoft AI models, which to date remain much smaller in scale than the most capable products from OpenAI or Alphabet Inc.”s Google.

Suleyman told employees in September that Microsoft would make “significant investments” to expand the capability of those models.

2025 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Amid a government shutdown that has dragged on for more than five weeks, the United States Congressional Budget Office said on Thursday that it recently suffered a hack and moved to contain the breach. CBO provides nonpartisan financial and economic data to lawmakers, and The Washington Post reported that the agency was infiltrated by a “suspected foreign actor.”

CBO spokesperson Caitlin Emma told WIRED in a statement that it has “implemented additional monitoring and new security controls to further protect the agency’s systems” and that “CBO occasionally faces threats to its network and continually monitors to address those threats.” Emma did not address questions from WIRED about whether the government shutdown has impacted technical personnel or cybersecurity-related work at CBO.

With increasing instability in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) leaving Americans hungry, air traffic control personnel shortages disrupting flights, financial devastation for federal workers, and mounting operational shortages at the Social Security Administration, the shutdown is increasingly impacting every corner of the US. But researchers, former and current government workers, and federal technology experts warn that gaps in foundational activities during the shutdown—things like system patching, activity monitoring, and device management—could have real effects on federal defenses, both now and for years to come.

“A lot of federal digital systems are still just running in the cloud throughout the shutdown, even if the office is empty,” says Safi Mojidi, a longtime cybersecurity researcher who previously worked for NASA and as a federal security contractor. “If everything was set up properly, then the cloud offers an important baseline of security, but it’s hard to rest easy during a shutdown knowing that even in the best of times there are problems getting security right.”

Even before the shutdown, federal cybersecurity workers were being impacted by reductions in force at agencies like the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—potentially hindering digital defense guidance and coordination across the government. And CISA has continued cutting staff during the shutdown as well.

In a statement, spokesperson Marci McCarthy said “CISA continues to execute on its mission” but did not answer WIRED’s specific questions about how its work and digital defenses at other agencies have been impacted by the government shutdown, which she blamed on Democrats.

The government’s transition to the cloud over the last decade, as well as increased attention to cybersecurity in recent years, does provide an important backstop for a disruption like a shutdown. Experts emphasize, though, that the federal landscape is not homogenous, and some agencies have made more progress and are better equipped than others. Additionally, missed and overlooked digital security work that accumulates during the shutdown will create a backlog when workers return that could be difficult to surmount.