Asia Tech Wire (Aug 6) -- OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced Monday that he will be joining artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic.

In a farewell letter to his OpenAI colleagues, Schulman said he chose to leave to focus more on AI alignment research and to start a new career chapter at Anthropic.

He emphasized that his departure was not due to a lack of support for alignment research at OpenAI, but rather a personal career choice.

Schulman began working at OpenAI only after earning a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2016.

In addition to Schulman's departure, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed that OpenAI President Greg Brockman is taking an extended leave of absence to "relax and recharge".

And according to The Information, Peter Deng, the head of product who joined OpenAI last year after leading products at Meta Platforms, Uber, and Airtable, has also left.