A report from Fortune reveals that OpenAI co-founder John Schulman is leaving Anthropic to join former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s unnamed startup after five months at Anthropic.
Details are sparse since this wasn’t supposed to be public information. Fortune noted that its sources were known to the outlet but remained anonymous. Schulman confirmed the report with a post on X today:
Confirming that I left Anthropic last week. Leaving wasn't easy because I enjoyed the stimulating research environment and the kind and talented people I was working with, but I decided to go with another opportunity that I found extremely compelling. I'll share more details in the coming weeks. Thanks to Jared, Jan, Dario, and others for the support during my time at Anthropic, and I wish them all the best.
As for Murati’s startup, not much is known. The former OpenAI CTO left in September after overseeing projects like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4. Her new company is reportedly focused on AI and has raised over $100 million in funding. Though the name of the company isn’t public, The Information reports that she plans to call it "Thinking Machines Lab."
Schulman is the latest ex-OpenAI staffer to join Murati’s startup. The company has already recruited Christian Gibson, an engineer from the OpenAI Supercomputing team; Mario Saltarelli, a former IT manager at OpenAI; Jonathan Lachman, a former OpenAI executive; and several researchers from rival AI firms like Character.ai and Google DeepMind.
Prominent AI figures leaving to start their own ventures is nothing new. This past year alone saw the departure of OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who left in May 2024 to cofound Safe Superintelligence Inc.
In November, Google lost a key AI pioneer when Keras creator François Chollet left to start a new company with a friend. A month later, key members of the NotebookLM team, including team lead Raiza Martin, designer Jason Spielman, and engineer Stephen Hughes, announced their departure and left to establish their own startup.
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