OpenAI Co-founder John Schulman Joins Rival Startup Anthropic

John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has left the company to join rival AI startup Anthropic. In addition, OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman will be taking an extended leave until the end of the year to "relax and recharge" after nine years at the company.

Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year after holding leadership roles at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, also exited some time ago, as confirmed by the company. 

Schulman shared his decision on X, expressing a desire to deepen his focus on AI alignment — ensuring AI behaves as intended — and engage in more hands-on technical work. “I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulman said. “I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me.”

Schulman’s journey with OpenAI began shortly after he completed his PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. He played a crucial role in creating the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT by leading OpenAI’s reinforcement training team, which fine-tunes generative AI models to follow human instructions.

Following the departure of AI safety researcher Jan Leike, who also moved to Anthropic, Schulman became the head of OpenAI’s alignment science efforts, known as the “post-training” team. He was also a member of OpenAI’s recently formed safety committee, though it is unclear who will replace him in that role.

Despite ongoing controversies surrounding OpenAI, particularly regarding the company’s approach to and treatment of AI safety research, Schulman emphasised that his departure was not due to a lack of support at OpenAI.