Image: John Schulman website
Meanwhile, fellow founder and president Greg Brockman is taking a sabbatical through the end of the year.
OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has announced his departure from the AI start-up to join rival Anthropic.
In a note to colleagues shared on X today (6 August), Schulman said his choice to leave OpenAI stems from his “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,” Schulman said.
“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.”
Fellow co-founder Greg Brockman, who is also the president of OpenAI, announced around the same time that he is taking a sabbatical through the end of the year.
“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI nine years ago,” Brockman wrote on X. “The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI [artificial general intelligence] to build.”
This is not the first time core members of OpenAI have jumped ship to join rival Anthropic. In May, former OpenAI executive Jan Leike left the company to join Anthropic in a similar role.
Leike was one of the leaders of OpenAI’s superalignment team, which was focused on the safety of future AI systems. But this team was dissolved after Leike and former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever resigned from the company earlier that month.
Leike spoke out against the company shortly after resigning, claiming he disagreed with OpenAI’s leadership about the company’s core priorities “for some time” and that these issues had reached a “breaking point”.
“I believe much more of our bandwidth should be spent getting ready for the next generations of models, on security, monitoring, preparedness, safety, adversarial robustness, (super)alignment, confidentiality, societal impact and related topics,” he said at the time.
Just last month, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, who left the company in February to work on personal projects, announced a new company called Eureka Labs that will enable students to study a wide variety of subjects through its AI platform.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI!” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote of Schulman’s departure. “You are a brilliant researcher, a deep thinker about product and society, and mostly, you are a great friend to all of us. We will miss you tremendously and make you proud of this place.”
Meanwhile, Elon Musk has revived his lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging that Altman and Brockman have breached the company’s founding contract by placing profits and commercial interests above public good.
Musk decided to sue OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman earlier this year for seeking to profit from its AI creations – only to drop it quietly in June.
In a lawsuit filed in California yesterday, Musk claims that the two “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture” by promising that OpenAI would be safer and more transparent than profit-driven alternatives.
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