Microsoft has formed a new Superintelligence team within its AI division, aiming to develop what it calls “humanist superintelligence” — advanced AI that remains under human control.

The team, announced Thursday morning in a post by Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, reflects the company’s ambitions to shape the next era of artificial intelligence while addressing concerns about safety and control in the development of advanced AI systems.

“We are doing this to solve real concrete problems and do it in such a way that it remains grounded and controllable,” Suleyman wrote. “We are not building an ill-defined and ethereal superintelligence; we are building a practical technology explicitly designed only to serve humanity.”

The approach contrasts with the broader pursuit of artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the goal of creating AI systems that can match or surpass human capabilities across virtually any task — which is core to the mission of Microsoft’s longtime partner, OpenAI, and its CEO Sam Altman.

In his message, Suleyman cited early directions in areas such as healthcare, where Microsoft researchers are developing expert-level diagnostic models, and clean energy, where AI could accelerate breakthroughs in materials, batteries, and fusion research. 

The goal, he wrote, is to advance technology “within limits” — keeping humanity in control while harnessing AI’s potential to improve lives on a global scale

Suleyman will lead the new MAI Superintelligence Team, joined by Microsoft AI Chief Scientist Karén Simonyan and other core Microsoft AI leaders and researchers. Key leaders who’ve been involved in Microsoft’s model development work are also expected to be part of the effort.

The company hasn’t disclosed how large the group is expected to become.

Microsoft is creating a new internal mechanism for employees to report concerns about how its technology is developed and used — making the process similar to how workers already flag incidents of workplace misbehavior, security issues, or legal concerns.

In a message to employees Wednesday morning, company President Brad Smith said Microsoft was expanding its internal “Integrity Portal” to let workers raise issues related to the development and deployment of its technology. The new feature, called “Trusted Technology Review,” will allow employees to report information or concerns about potential policy violations.

Smith said the company is also changing its processes to “strengthen our existing pre-contract review process for evaluating engagements that require additional human-rights due diligence.”

The moves come after months of pressure inside and outside Microsoft over Israel’s use of the company’s technology in military and surveillance activities linked to the war in Gaza.

Microsoft has faced repeated protests from employees and activists, including a group called No Azure for Apartheid, which has accused Microsoft of enabling human-rights abuses through its cloud and artificial-intelligence services.

The company has said it is committed to upholding its human-rights principles and does not provide technology to facilitate mass surveillance of civilians.

In September, the company confirmed it had found evidence supporting parts of a Guardian investigation that Israeli military intelligence used Microsoft’s Azure cloud to store and analyze large volumes of intercepted Palestinian phone calls. Microsoft said it had since cut off access to certain cloud and AI services used by Unit 8200, Israel’s military intelligence agency.

“We continue to consider lessons learned and apply them to how we run our business and advance our mission in an increasingly complex world,” Smith wrote in the new message. He noted that employees can submit information anonymously, and Microsoft’s non-retaliation policy will also apply.

Separately, the Guardian recently reported that Israel’s cloud deals with Amazon and Google include a secret mechanism allowing the government to be alerted if a foreign legal order seeks its data. The report said Microsoft’s unsuccessful bid for that contract, known as Project Nimbus, faltered because the company refused to accept all of Israel’s demands.

Amazon responded at the time: “We do not have any processes in place to circumvent our confidentiality obligations on lawfully binding orders.”

Here is the full text of Smith’s message, obtained by GeekWire.

Hello Everyone –

You’ll recall that on September 25, I shared with you actions we took after investigating a news story that reported that Azure was being used to store phone call data obtained through mass surveillance of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank. In that message, I also said we’d continue to share lessons learned and how we will apply these going forward. Today I want to share additional steps we are taking to enhance our due diligence and governance processes. This is a part of an ongoing process and, as we continue to learn more, we’ll share further steps with you.

Today we are strengthening our diligence processes by expanding how employees can report information and concerns about how Microsoft technology is developed and deployed. These build on our long-established reporting and investigations processes on workplace behavior, legal and ethical concerns, and digital and physical security — all of which make it easy for employees to raise concerns through the Microsoft Integrity Portal.

We’re adding a new and easy way for employees to report information about practices that you believe may violate the company’s policies regarding the development and deployment of our technology. This is through a new section in the Microsoft Integrity Portal called “Trusted Technology Review.” Moving forward, if you have information on these topics, simply go to the portal and select the “Trusted Technology Review” when asked for type of report. We will then follow up to address this information. Our standard non-retaliation policy applies and you can raise concerns anonymously.

As part of our commitment to ongoing improvement, we are also taking new steps to enhance other aspects of our governance processes. As one step in that work, we are working to strengthen our existing pre-contract review process for evaluating engagements that require additional human rights due diligence.

As I’ve shared before, Microsoft is a company guided by principles and ethics. We continue to consider lessons learned and apply them to how we run our business and advance our mission in an increasingly complex world. We’ll continue to listen and learn and share new steps with you along the way.

Brad

Amazon this morning offered the first official glimpse of a new “store within a store” concept it’s testing to bring name-brand items to Whole Foods Market without sullying the grocer’s signature organic vibe.

The approach, first reported a few days ago by The Wall Street Journal, puts screens on the shelves that let shoppers scan a QR code to browse a wider Amazon selection in the app — picking items like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Tide Pods, or Pepsi for quick pickup at a nearby counter after they check out.

Behind the scenes, a 10,000-square-foot automated “micro-fulfillment center” inside the store uses robots to pull items from Amazon’s expanded inventory: popular snacks, cleaning supplies, frozen foods, personal care products, etc.

The system, built on technology from Silicon Valley startup Fulfil, prepares orders within minutes so they’re ready for customers by the time they finish shopping.

It’s one of the tightest integrations between Amazon and Whole Foods since the tech giant bought the grocer for $13.7 billion in 2017. Under Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel, who now oversees all of Amazon’s grocery stores, the company is looking to bring more of its tech expertise to a brand known for its strict ingredient standards and natural-foods identity.

Amazon has been trying to figure out the broader grocery business for 18 years, dating back to the original launch of Amazon Fresh delivery in the Seattle area in 2007. Thin margins and huge volumes make grocery one of the toughest and most tantalizing segments in retail.

The company has reported recent success with an initiative that offers perishable groceries for free same-day delivery as part of a unified cart when people check out on Amazon.com. CEO Andy Jassy called this approach a “game changer” on the company’s earnings call last week.

As part of its Whole Foods announcement this morning, Amazon confirmed that it’s testing the new concept at a store in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., and said for the first time that it plans to expand the approach to additional Whole Foods locations after gathering feedback.

It’s not the only concept currently in testing. The Wall Street Journal also reported on a separate trial in Chicago where Amazon replaced a coffee shop in the flagship Whole Foods’ lobby with a 3,800-square-foot “Amazon Grocery” kiosk to sell brands like Doritos and Chips Ahoy.

A new platform from the Allen Institute for AI promises to deliver insights into the state of the planet, in near real-time, by giving organizations without deep AI expertise the ability to monitor deforestation, assess crop health, and predict wildfire risk, among other capabilities.

OlmoEarth, announced Tuesday by the Seattle-based nonprofit AI institute, is an open, end-to-end system that uses AI to analyze current and historical satellite and sensor data.

It runs on a new family of AI models, which Ai2 says it trained on millions of Earth observations totaling roughly 10 terabytes of data. The idea is to give anyone free access to the kinds of capabilities typically restricted to proprietary systems or well-resourced AI labs. 

The platform includes tools such as OlmoEarth Studio, a workspace for creating datasets and fine-tuning models, and OlmoEarth Viewer, a web app for exploring AI-generated maps.

The initiative is “making Earth AI accessible to those working on the front lines,” said Ali Farhadi, Ai2 CEO and University of Washington professor, in a press release announcing OlmoEarth.

Patrick Beukema, lead researcher on the OlmoEarth team, added that the project is meant to encourage collaboration across scientific and technical fields, helping different groups work together on shared data and tools to better understand and respond to environmental challenges.

Ai2 said early adopters of OlmoEarth are already showing the potential, using it to update global mangrove maps twice as fast with 97% accuracy, detect deforestation across the Amazon, and map vegetation dryness in Oregon to improve wildfire prediction and prevention, for example.

It’s the latest example of Ai2’s push for “true openness” in AI, extending the philosophy behind its open-weight language and multimodal models into climate science and conservation.

Geospatial analysis has long been dominated by major tech and research organizations. Platforms like Google Earth Engine and Microsoft’s Planetary Computer provide cloud access to petabytes of satellite data, but often require significant technical expertise for analysis and are not fully open-source. 

Ai2 is positioning OlmoEarth as an end-to-end open alternative, providing not just data access but a complete, usable system for model fine-tuning and deployment.

At the model level, Ai2 is competing with AI-specific tools from other major labs. In its research, Ai2 contrasts OlmoEarth with Google’s AlphaEarth Foundations, noting that Google released “embeddings” rather than the open model itself. Ai2 says a fine-tuned OlmoEarth “outperformed AEF substantially,” and also did well against models from Meta, IBM, and NASA.

The OlmoEarth Viewer is available starting today, and Ai2 has released accompanying code and documentation on GitHub. The full platform, including OlmoEarth Studio, is rolling out to select partners, and Ai2 is inviting additional collaborations.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI, exercising newfound freedom under its renegotiated Microsoft partnership, will expand its cloud footprint for training and running AI models to Amazon’s infrastructure under a new seven-year, $38 billion agreement.

The deal, announced Monday, positions Amazon as a major infrastructure provider for Microsoft’s flagship AI partner, highlighting seemingly insatiable demand for computing power and increasingly complex alliances among big companies seeking to capitalize on AI.

It comes as Microsoft, Amazon, and big tech companies attempt to reassure investors who’ve grown concerned about a possible bubble in AI spending and infrastructure investment.

Under its new Amazon deal, OpenAI is slated to begin running AI workloads on Amazon Web Services’ new EC2 UltraServers, which use hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Amazon says the infrastructure will help to run ChatGPT and train future OpenAI models.

Amazon shares rose nearly 5% in early trading after the announcement.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in the press release announcing the deal. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

Matt Garman, the AWS CEO, said in the release that Amazon’s cloud infrastructure will serve as “a backbone” for OpenAI’s ambitions.

In an interview with CNBC, Dave Brown, Amazon’s vice president of compute and machine learning services, said the new agreement represents “completely separate capacity” that AWS is building out for OpenAI. “Some of that capacity is already available, and OpenAI is making use of that,” Brown told CNBC.

Amazon has also been deepening its investment in AI infrastructure for Anthropic, the rival startup behind the Claude chatbot. Amazon has invested and committed a total of $8 billion in Anthropic and recently opened Project Rainier, an $11 billion data center complex for Anthropic’s workloads, running on hundreds of thousands of its custom Trainium 2 chips.

Microsoft has been expanding its own relationship with Anthropic, adding the startup’s Claude models to Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and its Azure AI Foundry platform

Up to this point, OpenAI has relied almost exclusively on Microsoft Azure for the computing infrastructure behind its large language models. The new deal announced by Microsoft and OpenAI last week revised that relationship, giving OpenAI more flexibility to use other cloud providers — removing Microsoft’s right of first refusal on new OpenAI workloads.

At the same time, OpenAI committed to purchase an additional $250 billion in Microsoft services. Microsoft still holds specific IP rights to OpenAI’s models and products through 2032, including the exclusive ability among major cloud platforms to offer OpenAI’s technology through its Azure OpenAI Service.

OpenAI’s new $38 billion deal with Amazon builds on a relationship that began earlier this year, when Amazon added OpenAI’s first open-weight models in five years to its Bedrock and SageMaker services. Released under an open-source license, those models weren’t bound by OpenAI’s exclusive API agreement with Microsoft, letting Amazon offer them on its platforms.

The latest announcement is part of a series of deals by OpenAI in recent months with companies including Oracle and Google — committing hundreds of billions of dollars overall for AI computing capacity, and raising questions about the long-term economics of the AI boom.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Why is Amazon laying off 14,000 people in the middle of an AI boom — and is it really a boom at all? We dig into the contradiction at the heart of Seattle’s tech scene, discussing Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s “world’s largest startup” rationale and what it says about the company’s culture and strategy. And we debate whether AI progress represents true transformation or the familiar signs of a tech bubble in the making.

Then we examine the vision of Cascadia high-speed rail — the ambitious plan to connect Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver, B.C., by bullet train. Is it the regional infrastructure needed to power the Pacific Northwest’s next chapter, or an expensive dream looking for a purpose?

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop

Related headlines from the week

Amazon layoffs

• Amazon confirms 14,000 job cuts, says push for ‘efficiency gains’ will continue into 2026
• A tale of two Seattles in the age of AI: Harsh realities and new hope for the tech community
• Filing: Amazon cuts more than 2,300 jobs in Washington state as part of broader layoffs
• Amazon layoffs hit software engineers hardest in Washington
• Amazon layoffs reaction: ‘Thought I was a top performer but guess I’m expendable’
• Amazon CEO says massive corporate layoffs were about agility — not AI or cost-cutting

Amazon earnings

• Amazon stock soars 11% after topping Q3 estimates with $180B in revenue, $21B in profits
• Amazon’s Anthropic investment boosts its quarterly profits by $9.5B
• ‘Big Beautiful’ tax benefit: Amazon and other tech giants reap the rewards of new law, for now

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• Microsoft’s Azure reports cloud outage, disrupting global customers including Alaska Airlines
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Seattle-Portland-Vancouver

• Slowly but surely, high-speed rail backers believe Cascadia mega-project will become a reality
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• Beta’s unique electric airplane flies into Seattle to wow state officials and aviation experts

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Amazon’s cash tax bill has dropped sharply this year under a new U.S. tax law that lets companies immediately deduct the cost of equipment and research — a policy designed to encourage spending on technology development and other investments.

The decrease is detailed in the company’s third-quarter 10-Q filing, released Friday morning following its blockbuster earnings report. Amazon’s shares rose more than 10% in early trading after beating expectations and reassuring investors about long-term AI demand.

In the filing, Amazon cites the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025” as a key factor in the tax deduction. The situation illustrates how tax changes championed by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress are rewarding U.S. investment and reshaping corporate finances.

But it’s not as simple as a basic tax break: while the law accelerates short-term deductions for domestic investment, it also changes the tax treatment on foreign profits — boosting long-term tax liabilities overall.

According to its quarterly filing, Amazon paid $1.1 billion in cash for income taxes in the third quarter, a 45% decrease from the $2 billion it paid in the same period last year — even as quarterly profits rose 38% to $21.2 billion. For the first nine months of 2025, cash tax payments fell to $6.8 billion, down from $8.2 billion in 2024.

The new law changed two key rules that impact companies making big capital investments.

• First, it reinstated 100% “bonus depreciation,” allowing companies to deduct the full cost of new equipment — such as servers for AWS and AI or warehouse robotics — in the year it’s purchased rather than spreading the deduction over many years.
• Second, it restored the immediate expensing of domestic R&D costs, reversing a recent rule that required this spending to be amortized over several years.

Boosting capital spending and cutting jobs

For a company like Amazon, these changes create a significant and immediate reduction in taxable income. The tech giant spent $35.1 billion on property and equipment in the third quarter, up 55% from a year earlier, driven by massive investments in AI infrastructure.

Backers of the U.S. tax changes said they would spur investment and job creation in the United States, but Amazon’s situation shows that the reality is more complicated. The company is reaping the benefits of the new tax incentives while eliminating about 14,000 corporate jobs. 

Speaking on Amazon’s earnings call, CEO Andy Jassy attributed the layoffs not to cost-cutting but to efforts to simplify operations and reduce bureaucracy after years of growth. Amazon took a $1.8 billion pre-tax charge in the quarter for severance and other costs related to the layoffs.

Amazon isn’t alone in spending big on AI infrastructure or benefitting from the tax changes.

Although they didn’t go into as much detail as Amazon did, Microsoft and Google both referenced the 2025 U.S. tax law in their latest quarterly reports, noting the reinstatement of immediate R&D expensing and accelerated depreciation. Both companies are realizing similar near-term tax benefits as they expand their AI and cloud infrastructure investments.

Long-term tax provision still intact

For Amazon, the changes in U.S. tax law mark a new chapter in a long-running national debate. The company, which faced criticism in years past for paying little or no federal income tax despite strong profits, has long maintained that it pays what it owes under U.S. law.

However, the immediate reduction is only part of the picture.

While Amazon’s cash payments declined, the tax expense reported on its income statement — a figure based on accounting rules rather than cash paid — nearly doubled. The company’s income-tax provision for the first nine months of 2025 was $14.1 billion, up from $6.9 billion in the same period last year.

Amazon’s filing says this increase was also driven by the new tax act, which reduced other benefits, such as the deduction for profits made overseas. 

This $7.3 billion gap between its accounting provision ($14.1 billion) and its cash tax bill ($6.8 billion) shows how the new law shifts the timing of tax payments rather than eliminating them. In effect, the deductions reduce the company’s cash outlay for taxes in the short term but will ultimately be paid in future years as those assets are depreciated on the company’s books.

Amazon’s third-quarter profits rose 38% to $21.2 billion, but a big part of the jump had nothing to do with its core businesses of selling goods or cloud services.

The company reported a $9.5 billion pre-tax gain from its investment in the AI startup Anthropic, which was included in Amazon’s non-operating income for the quarter.

The windfall wasn’t the result of a sale or cash transaction, but rather accounting rules. After Anthropic raised new funding in September at a $183 billion valuation, Amazon was required to revalue its equity stake to reflect the higher market price, a process known as a “mark-to-market” adjustment.

To put the $9.5 billion paper gain in perspective, the Amazon Web Services cloud business — historically Amazon’s primary profit engine — generated $11.4 billion in quarterly operating profits.

At the same time, Amazon is spending big on its AI infrastructure buildout for Anthropic and others. The company just opened an $11 billion AI data center complex, dubbed Project Rainier, where Anthropic’s Claude models run on hundreds of thousands of Amazon’s Trainium 2 chips.

Amazon is going head-to-head against Microsoft, which just re-upped its partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI; and Google, which reported record cloud revenue for its recent quarter, driven by AI. The AI infrastructure race is fueling a big surge in capital spending for all three cloud giants.

Amazon spent $35.1 billion on property and equipment in the third quarter, up 55% from a year earlier.

Andy Jassy, the Amazon CEO, sought to reassure Wall Street that the big outlay will be worth it.

“You’re going to see us continue to be very aggressive investing in capacity, because we see the demand,” Jassy said on the company’s conference call. “As fast as we’re adding capacity right now, we’re monetizing it. It’s still quite early, and represents an unusual opportunity for customers and AWS.”

The cash for new data centers doesn’t hit the bottom line immediately, but it comes into play as depreciation and amortization costs are recorded on the income statement over time.

And in that way, the spending is starting to impact on AWS results: sales rose 20% to $33 billion in the quarter, yet operating income increased only 9.6% to $11.4 billion. The gap indicates that Amazon’s heavy AI investments are compressing profit margins in the near term, even as the company bets on the infrastructure build-out to expand its business significantly over time.

Those investments are also weighing on cash generation: Amazon’s free cash flow dropped 69% over the past year to $14.8 billion, reflecting the massive outlays for data centers and infrastructure.

Amazon has invested and committed a total of $8 billion in Anthropic, initially structured as convertible notes. A portion of that investment converted to equity with Anthropic’s prior funding round in March.

Microsoft reported fiscal first-quarter revenue and profits ahead of analysts’ expectations on Wednesday, with Azure revenue growth climbing to 40%.

The earnings report came as the company continued to deal with the lingering effects of a widespread cloud outage that started earlier in the day.

The company’s capital expenditures reached a record $34.9 billion — reflecting its long-term buildout of cloud infrastructure to meet demand for artificial intelligence. That was up from $24.2 billion in Q4. Microsoft had projected capital spending of more than $30 billion for Q1.

Along with that unprecedented buildout, Microsoft sought to address investor concerns about a potential AI bubble, by highlighting its commercial remaining performance obligation (RPO), a measure of future contracted revenue. That backlog grew 51% year-over-year to $392 billion.

The company also disclosed for the first time that this RPO has a weighted average duration of roughly two years, a move intended to show investors that its record capital spending is supported by strong, long-term customer demand.

Revenue was $77.7 billion for the quarter ended Sept. 30, Microsoft’s first quarter of fiscal 2026. That was up 18%, and compared with average analyst expectations of $75.39 billion. The company said the result was driven by strong demand for cloud and AI services.

Profits were $27.7 billion, or $3.72 per share, beating expectations of $3.66 per share.

Earlier Wednesday, an Azure cloud services outage disrupted operations for customers worldwide including Alaska Airlines, Xbox users and Microsoft 365 subscribers. Microsoft reported as of early afternoon that it was rolling back the faulty configuration and that customers should see improvements.

Microsoft stock was down by about 3% in after-hours trading. The company’s market value reached $4 trillion after the announcement of its new OpenAI deal on Tuesday morning.

With a new OpenAI partnership in hand, Microsoft is going into its earnings report Wednesday afternoon with a resolution to one of the biggest questions about its business.

The company’s market value reached $4 trillion again as Wall Street reacted to the details of the new Microsoft-OpenAI agreement, which gives Microsoft a 27% equity stake in OpenAI’s new for-profit entity, and a commitment for $250 billion in cloud purchasing by the ChatGPT maker.

Analysts expect the tech giant to report another strong quarter, fueled primarily by continued momentum in its Azure cloud business and growing adoption of its Copilot AI tools.

Quarterly revenue is expected to be about $75.4 billion for the first quarter of Microsoft’s 2026 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, according to numbers tracked by Yahoo Finance. That would represent a 15% jump compared to the $65.6 billion reported in the same period last year. 

Analysts expect earnings per share of $3.66, up about 11% year-over-year from $3.30.

Investors will be paying close attention to the growth rate in Microsoft’s Azure cloud business, with some analysts expecting as much as 39% growth (in constant currency, excluding the impact of exchange rates). Hitting this mark would exceed the company’s prior guidance and maintain the 39% growth pace set in the previous quarter.

Yet the potential for an AI bubble will no doubt be the focus of questions on company’s earnings conference call. Amid surging investment and growing valuations in the AI sector, some analysts and tech leaders are warning that the enthusiasm could outpace the business realities

Microsoft and Google parent Alphabet will both report numbers on Wednesday afternoon, and Amazon the following day, making for quick comparisons across the major cloud platforms.

As of the most recent quarter, ended in June, Microsoft reported more than $75 billion in annual Azure revenue for its just-ended fiscal year, compared to an annual run rate that had surpassed $50 billion for Google Cloud and a run rate of nearly $124 billion for Amazon Web Services (based on its $30.9 billion revenue in the June quarter).

Check back with GeekWire on Wednesday afternoon for full coverage.