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.