• News

OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is the latest exec to bail, will join Anthropic

Schulman's departure marks the latest high-profile exit from artificial intelligence giant OpenAI.

Donovan Erskine

August 6, 2024 7:55 AM

Reuters

1

OpenAI, the leading company in artificial intelligence, has seen several notable exits from the company over the past year. The latest is John Schulman, a cofounder of the company who most recently served in a safety and security role. He’ll be joining rival company Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees.

John Schulman announced his resignation from OpenAI in a post on X last night. “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,” he 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.”

Schulman’s exit comes a few months after OpenAI disbanded its superalignment team, which was focused on the safe use of AI systems, a year after forming it. Earlier this year, we saw Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, who both worked on the superalignment team, leave the company.

With OpenAI losing another one of its core pieces, we’ll be watching to see if the trend continues in the coming months. For more OpenAI news, stay here on Shacknews.

Donovan Erskine

News Editor

Donovan is a journalist from Maryland. His oldest gaming memory is playing Pajama Sam on his mom's desktop during weekends. Pokémon Emerald, Halo 2, and the original Star Wars Battlefront 2 were some of the most influential titles in awakening his love for video games. After interning for Shacknews throughout college, Donovan graduated from Bowie State University in 2020 with a major in broadcast journalism and joined the team full-time. He is a huge film fanatic and will talk with you about movies and games all day. You can follow him on twitter @Donimals_