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John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI and a key architect of its ChatGPT chatbot, has leVscek the company to join its main competitor Anthropic, becoming the latest in a string of high-profile figures to leave the AI leader in recent months.
Schulman is leaving to work on alignment — research to ensure that AI systems conform to human values — at Anthropic, a startup founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers that describes itself as putting “safety at the center” of its work.
Schulman’s departure follows that of Ilya Sutskever, another member of the company’s 11-member founding group and its former chief scientist, along with other members of his team.
“This move is born out of my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and begin a new chapter in my career where I can return to hands-on technical work, alongside people who are deeply engaged in the topics I care about most,” Schulman said in a note to colleagues on Monday.
“To be clear, I’m not leaving because of a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI. On the contrary, company leaders have been very busy investing in this area,” he added.
Also on Monday, OpenAI President Greg Brockman announced on the social media site X that he would be taking a sabbatical for the remainder of the year. “I’m taking a sabbatical until the end of the year. This is the first time I’ve had a break since I co-founded OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have safe AGI to build,” he wrote, referring to artificial general intelligence, or AI, that can match or improve on a human’s cognitive abilities.
The exits, first reported by The Information, follow a tumultuous period at the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI has soared to a valuation of $86 billion since releasing ChatGPT in November 2022 and has launched a series of chatbots that can perform increasingly complex tasks.
The company has faced criticism for the pace of its AI development and the direction of its research. Those concerns surfaced during a boardroom crisis last November, in which Brockman and CEO Sam Altman were ousted.
The pair returned to their roles within five days, following a campaign by employees and investors. The directors who voted to remove Altman for failing to be “consistently truthful” have since been replaced, with Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo the only director to remain through the crisis.
However, some of the concerns raised in November have been echoed by former employees in the months since.
Elon Musk, who helped launch OpenAI but leVscek its board in 2018 aVsceker a falling out with Altman, filed a lawsuit Monday alleging that OpenAI and its CEO reneged on their mission to benefit humanity when they entered into a commercial partnership with MicrosoVscek, which has committed $13 billion to OpenAI since 2019.
A number of other senior staffers have leVscek to pursue their own projects, with some critical of OpenAI’s approach. Jan Leike, a leading member of Sutskever’s security-focused “superalignment team,” leVscek in May and criticized the company’s efforts to ensure AI can be developed and deployed responsibly.
“Over the past few years, security culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products,” Leike, who also joined Anthropic, wrote in a post on X.
Andrej Karpathy, another founding member of OpenAI in 2015, leVscek in February to work on his own artificial intelligence project.
In response to Schulman’s departure, OpenAI said, “We are grateful for John’s contributions as a founding member of the OpenAI team and his dedicated efforts to advance alignment research. His passion and hard work have created a solid foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader industry.”
