It has only been proven for special types of Noetherian rings, so far. Examples exist to show that the conjecture can fail when the ring is not Noetherian on a side, so it is absolutely necessary for the ring to be two-sided Noetherian.
The conjecture is named for the algebraist Nathan Jacobson who posed the first version of the conjecture.
Statement
For a ring R with Jacobson radical J, the nonnegative powers are defined by using the product of ideals.
In other words: "The only element of a Noetherian ring in all powers of J is 0."
The original conjecture posed by Jacobson in 1956[1] asked about noncommutative one-sided Noetherian rings, however Israel Nathan Herstein produced a counterexample in 1965,[2] and soon afterwards, Arun Vinayak Jategaonkar produced a different example which was a left principal ideal domain.[3] From that point on, the conjecture was reformulated to require two-sided Noetherian rings.
Partial results
Jacobson's conjecture has been verified for particular types of Noetherian rings:
Cauchon, Gérard (1974), "Sur l'intersection des puissances du radical d'un T-anneau noethérien", Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, Série A (in French), 279: 91–93, MR0347894
Goodearl, K. R.; Warfield, R. B. Jr. (2004), An introduction to noncommutative Noetherian rings, London Mathematical Society Student Texts, vol. 61 (2 ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxiv+344, ISBN0-521-54537-4, MR2080008
Rowen, Louis H. (1988), Ring theory. Vol. I, Pure and Applied Mathematics, vol. 127, Boston, MA: Academic Press Inc., pp. xxiv+538, ISBN0-12-599841-4, MR0940245