OpenAI cofounder John Schulman has left rival artificial intelligence firm Anthropic, a job he held for about six months.
“We are sad to see John go but fully support his decision to pursue new opportunities and wish him all the very best,” Anthropic’s chief science officer Jared Kaplan said in a statement to Business Insider.
The Information first reported the departure. Schulman did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Schulman left OpenAI, where he worked for nine years, in August. In a note sent to the ChatGPT-maker’s employees at the time, he said he was joining Anthropic to deepen his focus on AI alignment — the process of steering human values and goals into large language models.
“I’ve made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. 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 in a statement on X at the time. “I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic.”
Schulman was part of a string of high-level departures from OpenAI last year, including chief technology officer Mira Murato and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s superalignment group — a team that focuses on making its AI systems align with human interests — left the company for Anthropic in May.
Anthropic was founded by sibling duo Dario and Daniela Amodei, former OpenAI employees who left in 2020 to launch their own AI startup that prioritized AI safety and responsible development. Claude is the company’s flagship language model and a direct competitor to ChatGPT. The pair are part of at least 23 former OpenAI employees that have left the startup to launch their own companies.
The post OpenAI cofounder John Schulman leaves Anthropic months after joining appeared first on Business Insider.
