OpenAI Co-Founder John Schulman Joins Anthropic

One of OpenAI’s co-founders is departing the company to join artificial intelligence (AI) competitor Anthropic.

John Schulman announced his exit on X Monday (Aug. 5) evening, months after OpenAI dissolved its safety-focused superalignment team, and hours before another co-founder – company president Greg Brockman – said he was going on sabbatical for the remainder of the year.

“This choice stems from my 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,” Schulman wrote.

“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.”

He added that his decision was not because OpenAI didn’t support the topic, saying that, on the contrary, its leaders “have been very committed to investing in this area.”

The leaders of the superalignment team, Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, both left this year. Leike is now with Anthropic, while Sutskever, also an OpenAI co-founder, launched a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

While Sutskever has expressed confidence in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s AI safety priorities, Leike said he felt his team was at odds with the rest of the company.

“Building smarter-than-human machines is an inherently dangerous endeavor,” he wrote in May.

“OpenAI is shouldering an enormous responsibility on behalf of all of humanity.”

Brockman, meanwhile, announced on X Monday he was taking a sabbatical for the rest of 2024.

“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” he wrote. “The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.”

AGI refers to “artificial general intelligence,” an as-yet-unrealized version of AI that can think and reason at the level of human beings.

OpenAI executives have said – at varying times – that the technology is within five to 15 years of becoming a reality.

As PYMNTS wrote recently, the reports of these efforts have sparked discussion in the business community of the possibility of AI-powered commerce that could reshape the rules of global trade, assuming the technology lives up to the hype.

“OpenAI’s pursuit of human-level reasoning isn’t just a technological marvel; it’s a narrative of pushing boundaries and sparking new possibilities in every sector,” Ghazenfer Mansoor, founder and CEO of Technology Rivers, told PYMNTS. “In business, AI can dramatically change how supply chains are managed, forecast market trends with great accuracy, and make customer experiences very personal on a big scale.”