OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves Sam Altman company for rival Anthropic

John Schulman, one of the co-founders of artificial intelligence (AI) company OpenAI, has left the ChatGPT maker for rival Anthropic, he said in a post on social media 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,” he wrote.
He added, “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. 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.”
Reflecting on his work at the Sam Altman company, John Schulman said, “I joined OpenAI almost 9 years ago as part of the founding team after grad school. It’s the first and only company where I’ve ever worked, other than an internship. It’s also been quite a lot of fun. I’m grateful to Sam and Greg for recruiting me back at the beginning, and Mira and Bob for putting a lot of faith in me, bringing great opportunities and helping me successfully navigate various challenges. I’m proud of what we’ve all achieved together at OpenAI; building an unusual and unprecedented company with a public benefit mission.”
OpenAI faces significant personnel changes as company’s president and co-founder Greg Brockman said that he is also taking a sabbatical through the end of the year. Peter Deng, a product manager who joined OpenAI last year, has also exited the company, it was reported. Company’s AI safety leader Aleksander Madry being reassigned to another role in July. Another one of OpenAI’s co-founders and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, left the company in May while Andrej Karpathy, who was also one of the AI firm’s founding members left OpenAI in February.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was also one of the co-founders of OpenAI, left the company as well and revived his lawsuit against CEO Sam Altman saying that the firm put profits and commercial interests ahead of public good.