person
John Schulman
Anthropic alignment researcher; OpenAI co-founder
Co-founder of OpenAI who led ChatGPT's post-training. Left OpenAI for Anthropic in 2024 to focus on alignment; briefly joined xAI then returned to alignment work.
Profile
expertise
Frontier builder
Currently or recently led training, architecture, or safety work on a frontier model. Hands on the loss curve.
Co-founder of OpenAI. Invented PPO (now standard RL algorithm). Led RLHF team that built ChatGPT post-training. Joined Anthropic 2024, then Thinking Machines Lab as chief scientist 2025.
recognition
Field-leading
Widely known inside the AI and AI-safety community. Appears repeatedly in top venues, podcasts, or governance forums. Not a household name to outsiders.
Prominent inside ML; less press coverage outside it. Lab moves were tracked by The Information and Bloomberg.
vintage
Deep-learning rise
Came up post-AlexNet. ImageNet, AlphaGo, transformer paper. DeepMind, Google Brain, FAIR establish the modern lab template.
OpenAI co-founder 2015, PPO 2017. His career anchors in the deep-learning era; the scaling era is when his work goes public.
Hand-classified. See the board for the criteria and the full grid.
Strategy positions
Alignment firstendorses
Solve technical alignment before capability thresholds closeHas publicly stated that deepening his focus on alignment was the reason for leaving OpenAI.
“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.”
Closest strategy neighbours
by jaccard overlapOther people whose strategy tags overlap with John Schulman's. Overlap is on tag identity, not stance; opposites can show up if they reference the same tags.
Record last updated 2026-04-24.