John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, announces he will depart and join Anthropic.

• John Schulman worked to refine models that go into OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot.
• The startup announced that Schulman would join a safety and security committee after two safety leaders departed.
• Schulman said OpenAI executives have been committed to the area.

John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI, announced in a Monday X post that he would be leaving the company to join Anthropic, an AI startup backed by Google.

OpenAI disbanded a superalignment team that aimed to ensure people can control AI systems that surpass human abilities in many tasks less than three months ago.

Schulman has been a co-leader of OpenAI's post-training team that refined AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and a programming interface for third-party developers. In June, OpenAI announced that Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee that would provide advice to the board. Since receiving a Ph.D. in computer science in 2016 from the University of California, Berkeley, Schulman has only worked at OpenAI.

My decision to pursue a new career path in AI alignment is motivated by my desire to deepen my focus on this area and return to hands-on technical work.

He stated that he wouldn't depart due to insufficient backing for novel projects related to OpenAI.

"Despite what was previously believed, company leaders have been highly dedicated to investing in this area," he stated.

This year, both Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, co-founders of the superalignment team, left. Leike joined Anthropic, while Sutskever stated that he was assisting in the formation of a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Since Anthropic was founded in 2021 by OpenAI staff members, the two San Francisco-based companies have been competing to create the most advanced generative AI models capable of producing human-like text. Large language models have also been developed by Amazon, Google, and Meta.

"I'm thrilled to collaborate with you once more!" Leike responded to Schulman's message.

OpenAI's early strategy was influenced by Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO, who shared his thoughts on Schulman's perspective in a post.

After Altman was pushed out as chief last November, Schulman and others left the board. This was followed by the resignation of Sutskever and two other board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, due to employee protests. However, Altman was later reinstated and OpenAI took on additional board members.

According to a podcast, Toner stated that Altman had provided the board with inaccurate information about the "limited number of formal safety procedures that the company had in place."

An independent review conducted by WilmerHale found that the board did not prioritize product safety when it removed Altman from his position.

Altman announced on X last week that OpenAI has been collaborating with the US AI Safety Institute on a deal to provide early access to our next foundation model. This partnership aims to advance the field of AI evaluations. Additionally, Altman stated that OpenAI remains dedicated to reserving 20% of its computing resources for safety initiatives.

On Monday, Greg Brockman, OpenAI's co-founder and president, announced that he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.

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