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Jan Reike, one of the company's chief safety researchers who resigned from artificial intelligence company OpenAI earlier this month, announced on Tuesday that he had joined rival AI startup Anthropic.
Reike announced his departure from OpenAI on May 15, days before the company dissolved the Super Alignment Group, which Reike co-led. The team, formed in 2023, focused on long-term AI risks. OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever announced his departure in a post on X on May 14.
“I'm excited to join @AnthropicAI and continue the superalignment mission,” Reike wrote to X. “My new team will work on scalable supervision, weak-to-strong generalization, and automatic alignment.”
Anthropik is backed by Amazon, which has committed up to $4 billion for a minority stake in the company.
“Leaving this job was one of the hardest things I've ever done, given the urgent need to figure out how to steer and control AI systems that are far smarter than we are,” Reicke wrote in a post after leaving OpenAI.
Since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT in late 2022, AI safety has rapidly gained importance across the tech sector, leading a boom in generative AI products and investments. Some in the industry have expressed concern that companies are rushing too quickly to release powerful AI products to the public without fully considering potential societal harms.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI said on Tuesday it has formed a new safety and security committee, led by senior executives including CEO Sam Altman, that will recommend to the company's board of directors “decisions regarding the safety and security of OpenAI's projects and operations.”
Founded in 2021 by siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei and other former OpenAI executives, Antropic released a ChatGPT competitor, Clode 3, in March. The company has received funding from Amazon, as well as Google, Salesforce and Zoom.
clock: Anthropic co-founders talk about AI adoption
