OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced on Monday that he is leaving the Microsoft-backed company to join Anthropic, an artificial intelligence startup funded by Amazon.
Schulman’s departure follows the disbandment of OpenAI’s superalignment team, which was dedicated to ensuring that advanced AI systems remain under human control.
Both leaders of this team, Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, left earlier this year. Leike joined Anthropic, while Sutskever is involved in founding a new venture, Safe Superintelligence.
In a detailed post on X, Schulman explained his decision: “I’ve made the difficult choice to leave OpenAI to focus more deeply on AI alignment and to embark on a new chapter of my career where I can engage in hands-on technical work. I believe that at Anthropic, I can gain new perspectives and collaborate with others who are deeply committed to the topics I care about.”
Schulman added that his decision was driven by his desire to align his efforts with his career goals in this new phase.
At OpenAI, Schulman co-led the post-training team responsible for refining AI models used in the ChatGPT chatbot and its programming interface for developers. In June, OpenAI announced that Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee advising the board.
Schulman has been with OpenAI since completing his PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016.
Since Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI staff in 2021, the two San Francisco-based companies have been competing to develop the most advanced generative AI models capable of producing human-like text.
Additionally, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, revealed on Monday that he will take a sabbatical for the remainder of the year.
