OpenAI VP leaves hours after Sam Altman’s Pentagon deal, joins Anthropic; says: Many of people I most trust and respect have joined Anthropic over…

OpenAI VP of Research Max Schwarzer has left to join Claude-maker OpenAI. In a post on microblogging platform X (formerly Twitter), Schwarzer said that many of the people he “trusts most and respects” have joined Anthropic over the last couple of years. Max Schwarzer was an early participant in the o1 inference model and led the post-training of the company’s o1 and o3 models. At OpenAI, he also headed the post-training team, delivering GPT-5, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3-Codex. The exit comes after the Sam Altman-led AI company announced an agreement with the Department of War for deploying advanced AI systems in classified environments. Since the announcement, around 1.5 million subscribers have reportedly left ChatGPT amid fierce public blowback over whether the agreement actually protected Americans from AI-powered surveillance.Notably, Anthropic already rejected an update to its contract with the Pentagon because it felt the language didn’t adhere to the company’s redlines around the use of AI in mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.

What OpenAI VP Max Schwarzer wrote on X announcing his exit

Sharing the post, Max Schwarzer wrote: “I’ve decided to leave OpenAI. I’m incredibly proud of all the work I’ve been part of here, from helping create the reasoning paradigm with @MillionInt, scaling up test-time compute with @polynoamial, working on RL algorithms with my fellow strawberries, shipping o1-preview (which started life as of one of my derisking runs), to post-training o1 and o3 with @ericmitchellai, @yanndubs and many others. I’m most proud of having led the post-training team here for the last year — the team has done incredible work and shipped some really smart models, including GPT-5, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3-Codex. OpenAI has genuinely some of the most talented researchers I have ever met, and I have learned more than I could have imagined knowing since I joined as a new grad. I want to thank @markchen90 @FidjiSimo @sama @merettm for all their support over my time here, and too many collaborators to name for the insights, ideas, and just plain fun we have had working together. After leading post-training for a year, though, I’m longing to start fresh and return to IC research work. I’ve been thinking about going back to technical research for quite some time, and I genuinely believe my colleagues and team here are set up to succeed going forward without me.I’m personally very excited for my next chapter — I’m proud to be joining @AnthropicAI to get back into the weeds in RL research, and I’m looking forward supporting my friends there at this important time. Many of people I most trust and respect have joined Anthropic over the last couple of years, and I’m excited to work with them again. I have also been very impressed with Anthropic’s talent, research taste and values, and I’m excited to be part of what the company does next!”