OpenAI co-founder joins arch rival Anthropic to build AI ‘responsibly’

Only two of the 11 co-founders remain at the ChatGPT creator

AI startup Anthropic was founded in 2021 to focus on developing artificial intelligence safely (Reuters)

One of the co-founders of OpenAI has joined a major rival of the ChatGPT creator amid a significant exodus from the artificial intelligence company.

Durk Kingma, who helped setup OpenAI in 2015 alongside Elon Musk and current CEO Sam Altman, said he was joining Anthropic in order to develop “powerful AI systems responsibly”.

His move comes just a week after OpenAI ditched its founding principles by completely overhauling its business structure to become a for-profit company.

“Anthropic’s approach to AI development resonates significantly with my own beliefs; looking forward to contributing to Anthropic’s mission of developing powerful AI systems responsibly,” he wrote in a post to X.

“Can’t wait to work with their talented team, including a number of great ex-colleagues from OpenAI and Google, and tackle the challenges ahead!”

The research scientist’s work on generative AI models were integral to the development of OpenAI’s Dall-E image generator and popular chatbot ChatGPT, though it is not clear what his specific role will be at Anthropic.

Mr Kingma’s move comes less than a month after fellow OpenAI co-founder John Schulman announced that he was also joining Anthropic to focus on the safe and ethical development of AI.

“I’ve made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI. This choice stems from my desire to deepen my focus on AI alignment, and to start a new chapter of my career where I can return to hands-on technical work,” he wrote in a lengthy post to X.

“I’ve decided to pursue this goal at Anthropic, where I believe I can gain new perspectives and do research alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in.”

Other OpenAI co-founders to have left this year include former president Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, who served as the company’s chief scientist.

The departures mean that current chief executive Sam Altman and computer scientist Wojciech Zaremba are the only remaining OpenAI co-founders who still work at the company.

OpenAI’s switch to a for-profit company has been criticised by some of the former founders, including Mr Musk, who claimed that the move was “illegal”.