The round was led by SoftBank, with significant participation from Microsoft, Thrive Capital, and several sovereign wealth funds from the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. It arrives at a moment when enterprise AI spending has hit an all-time high globally, with Gartner projecting that worldwide AI software spending will surpass $297 billion in 2025, a 32% increase year-over-year.
More than 850 prominent figures have called for a prohibition on developing AI superintelligence, a move that could reshape enterprise AI investments and intensify the US-China technology race if adopted. The open letter, released Wednesday by the Future of Life Institute, defined superintelligence as AI systems that "significantly outperform all humans on essentially all cognitive tasks" - going far beyond today's chatbots and automation tools to systems that could autonomously make strategic decisions, rewrite their own code, and operate beyond human oversight.
