OpenAI CEO and two other executives depart

TMTPOST–OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced in a post on X on Monday that he will be leaving the Microsoft-backed company to join Anthropic, a rival artificial intelligence (AI) startup funded by Amazon.

Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder and its chairman, also announced Monday that he would be taking a sabbatical for the remainder of the year.

The transition comes less than three months after OpenAI disbanded its SuperAlignment Team, which aimed to ensure that AI systems beyond human capabilities could be controlled by people.

Peter Deng, the company’s vice president of product, also left the company in recent months. And earlier this year, several members of the company’s security teams left their roles.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist, left the company in May. Andrej Karpathy, who was also a founding member of the AI ​​company, left in February and launched an AI-integrated educational platform in July.

Schulman was co-lead of OpenAI’s post-training team, responsible for refining AI models for the ChatGPT chatbot and a programming interface for third-party developers, according to his website bio.

In June, OpenAI announced that Schulman, as head of alignment science, would join a safety and security committee to advise the board. Schulman had been with OpenAI since receiving his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016.

“This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment and begin a new chapter in my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” Schulman wrote in the social media post about X.

He clarified that his departure was not due to a lack of support for AI alignment at OpenAI. “On the contrary, the company’s leadership has shown a strong commitment to investing in this area,” he said.

Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, leaders of the former Superalignment team, both left OpenAI this year. Leike joined Anthropic, while Sutskever said he was starting a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Since its founding by former OpenAI employees in 2021, Anthropic has been competing with OpenAI to develop the most advanced generative AI models capable of producing human-like text. Amazon, Google, and Meta have also developed large language models.

“I am very happy to be working together again!” Leike wrote in response to Schulman’s post.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, noted in his own post that Schulman’s ideas shaped the startup’s early strategy.

Schulman and others chose to leave after the board ousted Altman as CEO last November. Employee protests led to the resignations of Sutskever and two other board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner. Altman was reinstated, and OpenAI added new board members.

Toner mentioned in a podcast that Altman provided the board with incorrect information regarding the company’s limited formal security processes.

An independent review by the law firm WilmerHale found that the board was not concerned about product safety when it fired Altman.

Last week, Altman told X that OpenAI “has worked with the U.S. Institute for AI Safety on an agreement to provide early access to our next baseline model to advance the science of AI assessments.” He said OpenAI remains committed to dedicating 20% ​​of its computing resources to security initiatives.

The leadership changes come shortly after reports that Microsoft and Apple withdrew their offers of board seats from OpenAI amid growing antitrust scrutiny of the company and its partners.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was also a co-founder of OpenAI and left the company three years later, filed a new lawsuit Monday against the company and its CEO Sam Altman, claiming the company put profits and business interests above the public good.

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