OpenAI co-founder quits, joins rival company Anthropic

John Schulman, a co-founder of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI, has announced his departure to join rival business Anthropic.


Schulman emphasized his wish to focus more on AI alignment and return to hands-on technical work in a late Monday social media post on platform X.

“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman said on his blog.

The move follows significant personnel changes at OpenAI. Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI, has stated that he will go on leave till the end of the year.

Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year, has also left the company. The Information originally reported on these developments.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

The company has lately seen multiple employment changes, with AI safety leader Aleksander Madry being moved in July.

Furthermore, co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company in May, while founding member Andrej Karpathy resigned in February to establish an AI-integrated education platform.

In a related development, Tesla CEO and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk reinstated his lawsuit against the business and its CEO Sam Altman on Monday. Musk claimed that OpenAI promoted profits and commercial interests over the public good.

As Schulman begins his new post at Anthropic, OpenAI undergoes a series of leadership changes that reflect the dynamic and fast growing nature of the AI sector.