Anthropic Hires OpenAI Co-Founder Durk Kingma

One of the less well-known co-founders of OpenAI, Durk Kingma, said today that he will be joining Anthropic

In a string of posts on X, Kingma said he’d be working from home in the Netherlands most of the time. He didn’t say which Anthropic organization he would join or lead.

When asked for feedback, an Anthropic representative said to look at Kingma’s posts.

“Anthropic’s approach to AI development is very similar to what I believe,” Kingma wrote. “[L]I’m excited to help Anthropic reach its goal of making responsible, powerful AI systems. Can’t wait to take on the tasks with their talented team, which includes some great people I used to work with at OpenAI and Google!”

Kingma has a Ph.D. in machine learning from the University of Amsterdam. Before becoming a research scientist on OpenAI’s founding team, he worked at Google for a few years as a doctoral student. When he worked at OpenAI, Kingma mostly did basic research. He led the algorithms team in creating techniques and methods mainly for generative AI models, such as image generators (like DALL-E 3) and big language models (like ChatGPT).

Kingma quit her job in 2018 to work as a part-time angel investor and adviser for AI startups. After leaving Google for a while, he returned in July of that year and started Google Brain, which became one of the company’s best AI research labs before merging with DeepMind in 2023.

Anthropic has already hired Jan Leike, who used to be the safety lead at OpenAI, in May and John Schulman, another co-founder of OpenAI, in August. Kingma’s hiring is their third big hire of talented people. The company made another big hire in May when it hired Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and Artifact, as its first head of product.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, was the vice president of research at OpenAI. He left the company because he didn’t agree with OpenAI’s plans, which included making more money-making projects. Amodei brought several people who used to work at OpenAI to start Anthropic. One of them was Jack Clark, who used to be the policy lead for OpenAI.

Anthropic has often tried to show that it cares more about safety than OpenAI.