John Schulman is leaving Anthropic just six months after joining the startup. Schulman was credited as one of the leading architects of ChatGPT.
He left OpenAI last August during the company's mass exodus where other high profile employees, including co-founders Jan Leike and Mira Muratti, also left the company.
While his actions might be seen as job hopping for many, but hopping between AI labs is actually a very common practice among the field's leading researchers.
Schulman announced his departure from Anthropic on X, saying the decision stemmed from a desire to deepen his focus on AI alignment-the science of ensuring AI behaves as intended-and engage in more hands-on technical work.
"I believe I can gain perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I'm most interested in."
Reacting to the news, the chief science officer of Anthropic said that although this news was a disappointing, but he fully supports Schulman's decision.
While Schulman hasn't revealed his plans after leaving Anthropic. Some speculated that just like many other OpenAI co-founders who have gone on to form their own Ai startup, Schulman could also have a similar plan for himself.
These include IIya Sutskever, who founder Safe Superintelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who launched Eureka Labs, and Vicki Cheung, who helped found Gantry.
But there is also rumours that Schulman has already jumped onboard the startup company founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
It is also unclear what his role would be in the Murati's company. As the startup company is still in its primal state, it has yet to announce a name or a clear product direction, though it has already made headlines for poaching employees from OpenAI, Character Ai and Google DeepMind.
Murati left OpenAI herself in September 2024, saying she wanted to "create the time and space to do my own exploration." In October 2024, she was in talks to raise over $100 million in funding for create a new startup company.
Last month, the startup made several high-profile hires, including Jonathan Lachman, former head of special projects at OpenAI.
Other sources also revealed that she poached Christian Gibson, who had been serving on OpenAI's super computing team, as well as Mario Saltarelli, a longtime IT manager at OpenAI.