Who are Safe Superintelligence's decision-makers?

SSI was founded in June 2024 by three people: Ilya Sutskever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy. Sutskever is a co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI and one of the most cited researchers in deep learning; he became CEO in July 2025. Daniel Levy, a former OpenAI researcher, serves as president and oversees the technical team alongside Sutskever.

The third founder, Daniel Gross — formerly head of AI at Apple and a Y Combinator partner — was the original CEO until Meta poached him in mid-2025 for its Meta Superintelligence Labs. His departure triggered the move of Sutskever into the CEO seat and Levy into the presidency; Sutskever publicly stated SSI "know[s] what to do" and ruled out a sale of the company.

SSI is a founder-led organization of roughly 50 people with no traditional commercial functions, so the buying committee is tiny and concentrated at the top. Strategy and any significant spend route through Sutskever (CEO) and Levy (president), with the founders effectively owning both vision and budget.

Because the company has no sales, marketing, or product org, there are no departmental budget owners to court the way you would at a typical enterprise. The biggest committed spend — compute — is essentially a single strategic relationship with Google Cloud, decided at the founder level rather than by a procurement team.

SSI is intentionally flat and research-dense: nearly everyone is a researcher or engineer, and the company has publicly emphasized hiring a small number of exceptional people over rapid headcount growth. It operates from two hubs — Palo Alto and Tel Aviv — chosen for access to top technical talent.

Rather than building out the org chart of a product company, SSI keeps overhead minimal so capital flows to compute and research. As it scales, the structure is expected to stay lean and mission-focused, with the founders retaining tight control over direction and no announced plans for a commercial or sales organization.