John Schulman joins Mira Murati's startup after short stint at Anthropic, as OpenAI alumni scatter
Feb 7, 2025
Key Points
- OpenAI cofounder John Schulman joins Mira Murati's Thinking Machines after a brief stint at Anthropic, signaling intense competition among OpenAI's founding team now backing separate startups.
- Schulman's choice of Murati over Ilya Sutskever's Reflection AI suggests material disagreements among cofounders about strategy, not just unified concerns about their former employer.
- The three cofounders running competing ventures creates genuine pressure on Sam Altman, who now faces two former partners leading well-funded rivals while contending with Anthropic and international competitors.
Summary
John Schulman Joins Thinking Machines After Brief Anthropic Stint as OpenAI Cofounders Scatter
OpenAI cofounder John Schulman is joining Mira Murati's startup Thinking Machines after a short stint at Anthropic, marking another high-profile defection from the AI lab wars. The move signals intensifying competition among OpenAI's founding team, each now backing separate startups with competing visions.
The talent fragmentation is striking. Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI cofounder, is raising new funding at a $20 billion valuation for Reflection AI. Murati is building Thinking Machines with Schulman now in tow. Both are implicitly competing with Sam Altman's OpenAI while also, conspicuously, not working together—a pattern that undercuts any simple narrative of "pro-safety" versus "pro-deployment" camps.
The internal politics at these companies appear far more complex than public positioning suggests. If the three cofounders shared a unified vision of what went wrong at OpenAI, they would likely have consolidated. Instead, the fragmentation suggests material disagreements not just about the parent company, but about each other's approaches. Schulman could have joined Sutskever's effort; he chose Murati's instead.
This represents a major win for Thinking Machines. Recruiting a cofounder away from Anthropic—where Schulman had recently landed—signals both confidence in Murati's direction and concern that other paths (including Sutskever's) may not be the right fit. The talent aggregation alone is enough to draw investor attention; Dylan Patel noted excitement about the team composition.
The broader context: trillions of dollars are at stake in frontier AI, which explains why individual contributors are willing to leave stable positions at scale-up-stage companies to raise at pre-revenue valuations and compete directly with their former employer. Schulman and Sutskever's departures, in particular, create genuine competitive pressure on Altman, who now faces two of his three cofounders running well-funded rivals while simultaneously contending with Anthropic and international competitors like DeepSeek.