John Schulman, one of OpenAI’s co-founders and a key architect of its ChatGPT chatbot, has left to join its main rival Anthropic, becoming the latest in a succession of senior figures to depart the leading artificial intelligence company in recent months.
Schulman is leaving to work on alignment — research to ensure AI systems conform to human values — at Anthropic, a start-up founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI researchers that bills itself as putting “safety at the frontier” of its work. Also on Monday, OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman announced on social media site X that he would take the rest of the year off.
Schulman’s departure follows that of Ilya Sutskever, another of the company’s 11-strong founding group and its former chief scientist, along with other members of his team.