Ilya Sutskever takes the helm at SSI after CEO exits

Mark Zuckerberg just proved that if he cannot buy your whole company, he will simply hire your CEO instead.

On Thursday, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced that Daniel Gross, co-founder and CEO of Safe Superintelligence (SSI), left the startup as of June 29. Sutskever is officially taking over as CEO while continuing to lead the technical team, and co-founder Daniel Levy will step into the role of president.

Meta wanted the company, settled for the boss

The leadership shakeup comes after weeks of rumors about Meta courting Gross.

Earlier this spring, Zuckerberg reportedly attempted an outright acquisition of SSI, which landed a massive $32 billion valuation in April. Sutskever turned the buyout down.

Sutskever addressed the acquisition talks directly on X, noting the team was flattered by the interest but focused on seeing their mission through. He insisted that SSI already has the compute, the talent, and the blueprint to build safe superintelligence independently.

Blocked at the front door, Meta recruited Gross anyway. He is heading to the newly created Meta Superintelligence Labs (MSL), an elite unit designed to advance frontier research alongside Meta's commercial products and Llama models.

Buying into the cap table and throwing millions at talent

Zuck might still get a piece of SSI after all, just through the back door.

Gross runs the venture fund NFDG alongside former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, and the fund owns a stake in SSI. According to The Wall Street Journal, Meta has offered to buy up to 49% of the limited partner stakes in NFDG. The deal would not give Meta access to internal SSI secrets, but it would give the tech giant an indirect financial interest.

Meanwhile, Meta is going all out to staff its new lab. Friedman and former Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang are already co-leading MSL, following Meta's $14.3 billion investment in Scale AI last month.

Reports indicate Meta is dangling compensation packages worth more than $100 million to poach top researchers from OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Bloomberg also reported talks to buy AI voice startup PlayAI, following earlier approaches to Perplexity AI.

Why it matters

For anyone tracking the race to superintelligence, this reshuffling shows how intensely concentrated the frontier talent war has become. Big tech is writing blank checks, effectively absorbing founders and key operators by brute financial force.

We think this transition puts SSI in a tricky spot. Sutskever pitched SSI as a straight-shot research lab with no distraction from commercial products. But keeping that promise requires billions in capital and elite recruiters. Gross was the operator handling business and investors while Sutskever handled the science. Now, Sutskever has to wear both hats, raising capital and pitching talent while competing directly against Meta's bottomless pockets.

For Meta, this is a clear strategic pivot. Dominating open source with Llama was phase one. By assembling Gross, Friedman, and Wang under MSL, Zuckerberg is building a dedicated moonshot machine aimed straight at OpenAI. The race for superintelligence looks less like an open field and more like a high-stakes duel between giant war chests.