More brain drain from OpenAI to Anthropic as the co-founder makes the move

OpenAI founder John Schulman has joined the list of departing OpenAI executives, making the move to Anthropic. But Schulman — and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman — went out of their way to be cordial and pleasant about the move, at least publicly.

“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 said in a statement on X. “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. To be clear, I’m not leaving due to lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI.”

Schulman added: “I am confident that OpenAI and the teams I was part of will continue to thrive without me. Post-training is in good hands and has a deep bench of amazing talent. I get too much credit for ChatGPT.”

Altman issued his own statement, where he said things that were even more cordial. 

“Thank you for everything you’ve done for OpenAI! 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,” Altman said in his own statement on X. “I first met John in a cafe in Berkeley in 2015. He said something like ‘on one hand, it seems ridiculous to be talking about AGI right now, but on the other hand, I think it’s very reasonable and here is why and also here is why I think it’s important to be talking about it’ and then laid out a significant fraction of what became OpenAI’s initial strategy. That took about 15 minutes and then we awkwardly chatted for another 45.”

The exchange of pleasantries belies a fierce battle between OpenAI and Anthropic, which can also be seen as a proxy struggle for AI market dominance between Microsoft — the largest investor in OpenAI, and Amazon — the largest investor in Anthropic. 

Schulman follows Jan Leike, who made the move from OpenAI to Anthropic back in May. Ilys Sutskever also left a senior role with OpenAI, but he is launching his own AI effort. 

Another troubling indicator at OpenAI was the transfer of safety executive Aleksander Madry, who was mysteriously reassigned. This also follows OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy’s departure back in February. 

Legal troubles for OpenAI

And if that is insufficient OpenAI drama, Monday also saw the opening of another chapter in Elon Musk’s legal challenges to OpenAI. Musk, who was also a co-founder of OpenAI, sued OpenAI in February in a California state court, accusing it of not being true to its original non-profit mission. That lawsuit was quietly dropped in June. 

On Monday Musk sued OpenAI again, but this time, the lawsuit was filed in a federal court. And this time, the legal accusation is that OpenAI is engaged in racketeering.

“This lawsuit bursts defendants’ hot-air philanthropy and holds them accountable for their misrepresentations to Musk and the public. It concerns far more than a $100 billion start-up, the future of AGI lies in the balance,” Musk’s lawyer Marc Toberoff said in a statement Monday. “The lawsuit alleges thatMusk was betrayed by Altman and his accomplices. The perfidy and deceit are of Shakespearean proportions.”