OpenAI co-founder John Schulman has announced that he will be leaving OpenAI to join the AI startup Anthropic, which is funded by Amazon.

John Schulman is the third high-level executive to depart from OpenAI within less than three months after the dissolution of the Superalignment team. His departure means that only three out of the original eleven founders remain at the company.

The Superalignment team focused on managing the long-term risks of AI technology, ensuring that AI systems could be controlled and aligned with human goals.

John Schulman stated: “This decision comes from my desire to focus more on AI alignment and to start a new chapter in my career, returning to the forefront of technological work.” He emphasized that his departure was not due to a lack of support for this topic at OpenAI, “On the contrary, the company’s leadership has been very committed to investing in this area.”

Before Schulman, the leaders of the Superalignment team, Jan Leike and OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, also left OpenAI this year. The former has joined Anthropic, while the latter has announced that he is helping to establish a new company named Safe Superintelligence.

Since its founding, Anthropic has attracted several former OpenAI employees, and its two founders also previously worked at OpenAI. Anthropic's founder Dario Amodei served as Vice President of the Research Department at OpenAI.