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Where have OpenAI’s founders gone?

Published

2 years ago

August 10, 2024

Just two of OpenAI’s 11-strong founding team are still active at the ChatGPT maker, after an exodus following November’s attempted boardroom coup against chief executive Sam Altman.

Three co-founders have departed so far this year, including John Schulman, who defected to its artificial intelligence rival Anthropic this week. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, also said on Monday he would be taking extended leave from the company.

A high rate of turnover is not unusual at a start-up. However, attrition of senior figures at OpenAI has stepped up in recent months following November’s leadership crisis, when Altman was fired by his board only to be reinstated days later.

Since then, the loss of executives and staffers working on AI safety and research has raised questions about the direction of the $86bn company, which is in a fierce battle to stay ahead of rivals including Google and Anthropic.

Some co-founders have absconded to rivals, others to launch their own AI companies, while the team’s most famous former member — Elon Musk — has become a vociferous critic of OpenAI in public and in the courts.

OpenAI had a larger number of founders than most Silicon Valley start-ups because Altman and Brockman wanted to build an AI supergroup of the top researchers in the field when it got started in 2015. Here is where those 11 founders are now.

Leavers

Greg Brockman

on a leave of absence since August 2024

Brockman is a core member of OpenAI’s founding team. He was persuaded by Altman and Musk to leave his job as chief technology officer at financial technology company Stripe and take on the same position at OpenAI.

He has been a key Altman ally since the beginning. When the board moved against Altman in a coup in November, Brockman was also removed as a director. The two returned to their posts together when the board backtracked five days later.

On Monday, the company’s president announced he would be taking a sabbatical for the rest of the year.

“First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago,” he wrote on X. “I’ve poured my life for the past 9 years into OpenAI, including the entirety of my marriage. Our work is important to me, but so is life.”

John Schulman

joined Anthropic in August 2024

Schulman, a research scientist who played a vital role in building the company’s ChatGPT chatbot, announced he would leave OpenAI on Monday. He was responsible for fine-tuning the company’s AI models and ensuring they behaved in a way that conformed to human values — a process known as alignment.

He will take up a similar role at rival start-up Anthropic, which itself was founded by ex-OpenAI researchers in 2021.

“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, alongside people deeply engaged with the topics I’m most interested in,” Schulman said in a note to colleagues on Monday.

Ilya Sutskever

left to found Safe Superintelligence in May 2024

Sutskever left his position as OpenAI’s chief scientist six months after voting with the company’s board to remove Altman. Sutskever, one of the most prominent researchers in the field, reversed his position and backed the chief executive’s return a few days later.

Nonetheless, he has been largely absent from public view in the months since the abortive coup, and in May he left to start a company called Safe Superintelligence.

Andrej Karpathy

left to found Eureka Labs in February 2024

Karpathy, a research scientist who was advised at Stanford by “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li, first left OpenAI in 2017 to join Tesla as a senior director. He returned to OpenAI in 2023 and left again a year later to launch Eureka Labs, which is building AI teaching assistants.‎

Durk Kingma

left for Google Brain in June 2018

Kingma, who worked on developing algorithms for generative AI models, left for Google in the summer of 2018. He has continued to lead research on large language models and image models at Google Brain, which merged with DeepMind last year.

Elon Musk

resigned from the board in 2018

Musk, who provided much of OpenAI’s early funding, left the company in 2018 after clashing with Altman over the direction of research. The billionaire launched a rival company, xAI, last year and claims he can overhaul OpenAI’s lead.

The Tesla, SpaceX and X chief has also launched a number of lawsuits against Altman and OpenAI, arguing this week that he was induced to invest in the AI company by its “fake humanitarian mission”.

Pamela Vagata

JOINED STRIPE in 2016

Vagata, listed as a founding member of OpenAI in the company’s launch announcement, makes no mention of the start-up in her LinkedIn profile. She joined Stripe as a technical leader in the fintech company’s AI team in 2016, and founded early-stage venture capital firm Pebblebed in 2021.

‎Vicki Cheung

JOINED LYFT in 2017

Cheung, who worked on language-learning app Duolingo before becoming OpenAI’s first engineer, left the company in 2017 to join ride-hailing start-up Lyft. In 2020 she founded machine learning start-up Gantry alongside former OpenAI researcher Josh Tobin.

Trevor Blackwell

left in 2017

Blackwell was a partner at Y Combinator, the San Francisco start-up accelerator that Altman ran before establishing OpenAI. He helped launch the AI company and left in 2017. A robotics enthusiast, he is now based in Gloucestershire, England.

‎Remainers

Sam Altman

Altman remains as OpenAI’s chief executive after surviving a boardroom coup in November, during which directors accused him of not being “consistently candid” with them. He was reinstated five days after being fired on the back of a campaign by employees and investors in OpenAI, including Microsoft.

The departure of other senior figures has left the 39-year-old as by far the most prominent figure at the company, and the reconstitution of the board after its failed ousting has further solidified his power.

Wojciech Zaremba

Polish computer scientist Zaremba remains at OpenAI where he works as a researcher. He called on the board to resign after they moved against Altman, and has since urged his chief executive and Musk to drop their “unnecessary fight”.

“It would be so much better to put your creative energy into building the future you dream of over a quarrel. May you (both) be happy and find peace,” he wrote in a post on X in March, signing off with a love heart.

Additional reporting by Madhumita Murgia

News

The Maine Town That Actually Wants a Data Center

Published

4 hours ago

June 26, 2026

Press Room

This year, Maine nearly became the first state to pass a statewide moratorium on new data centers. But before the law could take effect, supporters of an A.I. data center project in the small town of Jay rallied to fight the ban — and won. So why do residents there want one? We traveled to Jay to find out.

News

The Supreme Court says the U.S. can turn away asylum seekers at the border

Published

6 hours ago

June 25, 2026

Press Room

The Supreme Court says the U.S. can turn away asylum seekers at the border

The U.S. Supreme Court

Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images

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Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday handed the Trump administration a tool that could make it far more difficult for asylum seekers to enter the United States.

Asylum is a form of legal protection available to people fleeing persecution in their home countries if they meet certain criteria. Under U.S. law, an asylum seeker who “arrives in” the U.S. is entitled to apply for asylum and generally cannot be removed from the country until their asylum application is processed.

By a 6-3 vote, the high court ruled that federal law allows the government to stop asylum seekers from physically setting foot in the country, effectively keeping them from applying for asylum.

The Obama administration was the first to try stemming the flow of asylum seekers that way. But the lower courts blocked the policy on grounds that it violated federal law by denying asylum to people who otherwise would have qualified for it, had they been permitted to literally put one foot over the border.

The Trump administration, however, sought to revive the policy, contending that the lower court’s ruling “deprives the Executive Branch of a critical tool for addressing border surges and preventing overcrowding at ports of entry.” And on Thursday, the Supreme Court agreed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito ruled that because asylum seekers are not in the U.S. when they are turned away at the border, they did not “arrive in” the country. Therefore, he continued, the legal protections for asylum seekers have not kicked in.

Writing for the liberal dissenters, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Border Patrol agents speak with all immigrants at legal entry points and speaking with an agent is effectively the first step in “arriving in” the U.S.

News

Federal judge halts Trump’s election executive order seeking to create a federal voter list

Published

16 hours ago

June 25, 2026

Press Room

Federal judge halts Trump’s election executive order seeking to create a federal voter list

BOSTON (AP) — A federal judge on Thursday halted President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to create a federal voter list and limit who can receive a mail ballot.

U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani, who was nominated by Democratic President Barack Obama, sided with a coalition of nearly two dozen states that challenged the Republican president’s order in granting a summary judgment. Her ruling applies to this year’s midterm election cycle.

Plaintiffs argued in two lawsuits, both filed in federal court in Boston, that Trump’s order should be found unconstitutional because the states and Congress, not the president, have the power to set election rules. The judge agreed, noting in her ruling that the provisions of Trump’s order “unconstitutionally violate the separation of powers.”

It was the second ruling in as many days against executive orders Trump has signed seeking oversight of the nation’s elections. A separate ruling Wednesday prohibited an executive order he had signed last year that would have required people to show documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote.

The administration, in its motions to dismiss the lawsuits challenging the order seeking to establish a federal voter list, argued that the motions are premature and that plaintiffs lacked the legal basis to bring their claim based on the Administrative Procedure Act, which governs how federal agencies develop and issue regulations.

But in an interim order before Thursday’s ruling, Talwani said the motions pertaining to this year’s election cycle were relevant: “In light of the EO’s specific deadlines over the next three months, and the reality that elections will be occurring throughout this period with the November 3, 2026 midterm occurring in just five months, postponing judicial review is impracticable and may inflict significant hardship on Plaintiffs,” she wrote. That order denied the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss the challenges.

Trump’s executive order, the second one aimed at elections during his second term, comes as he continues to raise the specter of widespread voting by noncitizens as a reason to change election rules. But states already have detailed processes aimed at keeping their voter rolls accurate, and voting by noncitizens has been shown to be rare. It also is a felony that can be punishable by deportation.

Trump issued his second order in March after a bill he supported to overhaul voting stalled in Congress. The order would have had the federal government create a list of eligible voters and then directed the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to those on the list. Election officials argued that it was ripe for abuse and could cause chaos, and the postal union has objected to the idea of mail carriers policing ballots.

The Postal Service has published a proposed rule required by Trump’s executive order in the Federal Register. Among other things, the rule would not apply to primary elections or overseas ballots.

The lawsuit seeking summary judgment was filed by Democratic attorneys general representing 22 states and the District of Columbia. Also signing on were attorneys representing Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, which has a Republican attorney general.

The states also told the court that the move imposes a costly burden on election officials to comply and would spread fear about the possibility of prosecution. Stephen Pezzi, a lawyer for the Trump administration, had argued that no one would be prosecuted for violating the order.

In a separate lawsuit filed against the executive order, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., in May agreed with the Trump administration that it was too early to block the order because it had yet to be implemented. That lawsuit was brought by Democratic and civil rights groups, who have appealed.

Since his 2020 presidential election loss to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump has groundlessly claimed mail voting is rife with fraud and has launched a federal investigation into that year’s vote, even though repeated audits and investigations, including ones run by Republicans, found it was free of widespread fraud. Trump also has said he wants to “take over” election administration in Democratic areas.