AI Talent Battle Intensifies As OpenAI's 'Second Hardware Hire' Jumps To Anthropic

A member of OpenAI's technical staff has left to join rival Anthropic in the same role. Clive Chan announced his departure from OpenAI in a post on X.

"Personal update: I've decided to leave OpenAI. I'm proud to have been part of the custom chip program and grateful to everyone I got to build with and learn from along the way… It’s been a wild journey from second hardware hire, 2.4 years ago, to now, and I’m excited to watch these chips become one of the most important engines of AGI," he wrote.

Chan worked at OpenAI for a little over two years as a member of the technical staff, according to his LinkedIn. Prior to that, he worked at Tesla as a software engineer for over two years.

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Chan joined Anthropic this month as a member of the technical staff focused on Perplexity per Picojoule, a foundational metric for AI hardware efficiency. 

He noted that he was "deeply impressed" with Anthropic's talent, values and ambition, and is "energized by the pace and intensity of the past few days. It's time to build," he wrote about the new role.

Other OpenAI employees have left to join Anthropic in recent months. 

Last month, Anthropic hired the co-founder of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy. He is expected to create a new team focused on using Claude itself to speed up research on pre-training, an Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Karpathy is one of several OpenAI figures to land at Anthropic in under two years. Jan Leike, OpenAI's former head of alignment, made the move in May 2024. Co-founder John Schulman followed that August.

Anthropic recently overtook OpenAI as the world's most valuable startup after raising $65 billion in Series H, valuing the company at $965 billion. Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital led the funding round.

The company also brought on former Amazon Web Services (AWS) threat intelligence specialist Dlshad Othman to join its safeguards group. Othman will focus on areas spanning influence operations, surveillance and cyber threat investigations.

Photo: Shutterstock

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