John Schulman, one of the co-founders of , is leaving the company to join rival Anthropic, a company backed by Amazon and Google.
“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. 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,” John Schulman said on X (formerly known as Twitter).
“To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very committed to investing in this area. My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career,” he added.
Schulman is not the only high-ranking executive to leave the company. In related news, OpenAI’s President and Co-founder, Greg Brockman, also shared on X that he will be on sabbatical through the end of the year.
“I’m taking a sabbatical through the end of the year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build,” said Brockman.
Both Schulman and Brockman became a member of OpenAI’s founding team nine years ago.
In May, Ilya Sutskever, another co-founder of OpenAI, departed the company to launch a new AI venture, Safe Superintelligence Inc (SSI), with ex-Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and Daniel Levy, a former engineer at OpenAI.
Jan Leike, who also left OpenAI this year, is now working with Anthropic.
Another OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy also departed OpenAI in February to launch Eureka Labs, an AI-powered education platform.
“I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent. I’ve been heartened to see the alignment team coming together with some promising projects. With leadership from Mia, Boaz and others, I believe the team is in very capable hands,” added Schulman.
