- Ex-OpenAI exec Jan Leike joined rival AI company Anthropic days after he quit over safety concerns.
- Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team, left less than two weeks ago.
- It comes as OpenAI has been hit with a wave of resignations from employees recently.
OpenAI’s former executive Jan Leike announced he’s joining its competitor Anthropic.
Leike quit OpenAI less than two weeks ago and announced his departure on X, formerly Twitter. He accused the ChatGPT maker of putting “shiny products” ahead of “safety culture and processes.”
Leike co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team alongside cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who also resigned. The team was tasked with ensuring superintelligence doesn’t go rogue and has since been dissolved, with remaining staffers joining the core research team.
In addition to defecting to competitor Anthropic AI, which Amazon invested $4 billion in, Leike also called for potential recruits to join him at his new employer.
In a post on X Tuesday, Leike said, “I’m excited to join @AnthropicAI to continue the superalignment mission! My new team will work on scalable oversight, weak-to-strong generalization, and automated alignment research. If you’re interested in joining, my dms are open.”
Anthropic was founded by former OpenAI employees and siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei in 2021. Amazon has a minority ownership stake in the company, which has attempted to position itself as more safety-conscious than its rivals. The company previously said it will use Amazon Web Service’s cloud servers and chips to train and power its large language models.
Jan Leike did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
OpenAI has been hit recently with a small wave of departures. In addition to Leike and Sutskever resigning, a few other employees have recently quit the firm. Last week, policy researcher Gretchen Krueger announced in a thread on X that she resigned on May 14. She said that she shared some of the concerns voiced by others.
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it has set up a safety committee, which is being overseen by all of its board members: chair Bret Taylor, CEO Sam Altman, Nicole Seligman, and Adam D’Angelo. The company also revealed that it’s starting to test its “next frontier model.”
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