- A former OpenAI exec joined Anthropic, a rival company, days after he quit, citing safety concerns.
- Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI's Superalignment team, left less than two weeks ago.
OpenAI's former executive Jan Leike announced on Tuesday that he was joining its competitor Anthropic.
Leike quit OpenAI less than two weeks ago, announcing 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 the cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who also resigned. The team, which was tasked with ensuring superintelligence doesn't go rogue, has since been dissolved, with remaining staffers joining the core research team.
In addition to defecting to Anthropic, which Amazon has invested $4 billion in, Leike called for people to join him at his new employer.
In a post on X, 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 in 2021 by Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, siblings who formerly worked at OpenAI. 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 would use Amazon Web Services' cloud servers and chips to train and power its large language models.
Leike did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
In addition to Leike and Sutskever, a few other employees have recently left OpenAI. Last week, the policy researcher Gretchen Krueger announced in a thread on X that she resigned on May 14. She said she shared some concerns voiced by others.
OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it had set up a safety committee overseen by its board members Bret Taylor, Sam Altman, Nicole Seligman, and Adam D'Angelo. The company also said it was starting to test its "next frontier model."