John Schulman leaves OpenAI to join Anthropic

John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder and one of the researchers who helped turn its models into products such as ChatGPT, announced Monday that he is leaving the company to join Anthropic. There, he plans to focus on alignment, the field of research aimed at ensuring artificial intelligence systems act in line with people’s intentions and defined boundaries.

The move carries significance beyond a change of jobs. Schulman was part of OpenAI’s founding group in 2015 and has been one of the most prominent technical voices in work on the safety and training of language models. Anthropic, the creator of the Claude family of models, is also one of OpenAI’s main rivals in the race to develop advanced AI assistants.

From reinforcement learning research to ChatGPT

Before ChatGPT popularized conversational assistants, Schulman was already known in research circles for his contributions to reinforcement learning. The technique trains a system through rewards: the model tries out actions, receives signals about which ones are preferable, and adjusts its behavior.

At OpenAI, that work proved essential to developing reinforcement learning from human feedback, known as RLHF. The method uses human evaluations so that a model does more than generate plausible text—it produces responses that are more useful and better aligned with instructions. It was one of the building blocks that made it possible for ChatGPT to go from a technical demonstration to a product the general public could readily use.

Schulman said his decision was a personal one and that he wanted to return to more hands-on technical work, particularly alignment research. At companies developing increasingly capable models, alignment is no secondary concern: it seeks to reduce unwanted behavior, improve controllability and anticipate risks before systems reach millions of users.

Anthropic strengthens its safety profile

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees, including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. From the outset, it has placed model safety at the center of its commercial and scientific strategy. Its “constitutional AI” approach, for example, seeks to guide Claude’s behavior through an explicit set of principles rather than relying solely on case-by-case human judgments.

Schulman’s arrival gives Anthropic a researcher with hands-on experience in the most delicate phase of developing an assistant: post-training. This is when a base model, trained on enormous quantities of text, is adapted to follow instructions, refuse dangerous requests and sustain a useful conversation.

The competition between the two companies is no longer limited to releasing models with better results on technical benchmarks. It also extends to winning the trust of businesses and government agencies that need to know how a system responds to ambiguous instructions, sensitive data or high-risk uses.

More changes at OpenAI

The departure comes during a tumultuous summer for OpenAI. In May, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and chief scientist, and Jan Leike, who co-led the superalignment team with him, left the company. Leike said at the time that safety had taken a back seat to product priorities within the company, a criticism OpenAI implicitly pushed back on by defending the importance of its safety work.

It also emerged Monday that Greg Brockman, the president and another co-founder, will take an extended leave of absence through the end of the year. Brockman has not announced that he is leaving OpenAI, but his temporary absence adds to a period of internal transition following the company’s governance crisis last November.

OpenAI retains a dominant position in the AI assistant market, backed by its partnership with Microsoft and ChatGPT’s enormous adoption. However, the departure of researchers who helped build its technical foundations shows that the fight for specialized safety talent is as intense as the competition for customers, computing capacity and more powerful models.

For Anthropic, hiring Schulman strengthens its credibility in an area it has made a defining part of its identity. For OpenAI, the challenge will be to show that it can retain that critical expertise while accelerating the development of new products and keeping the risks posed by its systems under control.