John Schulman, a co-founder of OpenAI, has departed the company to join the rival AI startup Anthropic.
Additionally, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, is taking an extended leave until the end of the year to “relax and recharge” after nine years with the company, as confirmed by OpenAI.
Peter Deng, who joined OpenAI last year as a product manager after leading products at Meta, Uber, and Airtable, also left some time ago, according to the company. The Information had earlier reported the departures of Brockman and Deng.
A spokesperson expressed gratitude for Schulman’s contributions, stating, “We’re grateful for John’s contributions as a founding team member at OpenAI and his dedicated efforts in advancing alignment research. His passion and hard work have established a strong foundation that will inspire and support future innovations at OpenAI and the broader field.”
Schulman shared his decision on X, explaining that he wanted to focus more on AI alignment — ensuring AI behaves as intended — and engage in more 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. “I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me.”
Schulman began his journey with OpenAI shortly after completing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences at UC Berkeley. He played a crucial role in developing the AI-powered chatbot platform ChatGPT by leading OpenAI’s reinforcement training organization, which fine-tunes generative AI models to follow human instructions.
After AI safety researcher Jan Leike left OpenAI to join Anthropic, John Schulman took over as the head of OpenAI’s alignment science efforts, also known as the “post-training” team. He was also part of OpenAI’s newly established safety committee, though it’s unclear who will succeed him in this role.
Despite the controversies surrounding OpenAI, particularly regarding its approach to AI safety research, Schulman clarified that his departure was not due to a lack of support.
“Company leaders have been very committed to investment in [alignment research],” Schulman stated. “My decision is a personal one, based on how I want to focus my efforts in the next phase of my career.”
With Schulman’s exit, only three of OpenAI’s 11 original founders remain: CEO Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba, who leads language and code generation.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI!” Altman wrote to Schulman in a post on X. “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.”
Update: This story was originally published at 5:38 p.m. and has been updated to reflect OpenAI’s confirmation of Brockman’s and Deng’s departures.