In Brief
Posted:
2:04 PM PST · January 15, 2026
Image Credits:Alex Wong / Getty Images
AI labs just can’t get their employees to stay put.
Yesterday’s big AI news was the abrupt and seemingly acrimonious departure of three top executives at Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab. All three were quickly snapped up by OpenAI, and now it seems they won’t be the last to leave. Alex Heath is reporting that two more employees are expected to leave for OpenAI in the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to pull alignment researchers away from OpenAI. The Verge is reporting that one of OpenAI’s senior safety research leads, Andrea Vallone, has left the company for Anthropic. Vallone specializes in how AI models respond to mental health issues — which is a particularly sensitive issue for OpenAI after its recent sycophancy problems. As The Verge notes, Vallone will be working under alignment researcher Jan Leike, who left OpenAI in 2024 over concerns the company wasn’t taking safety seriously enough.
If that wasn’t enough, OpenAI finished things off with one last major poach. Max Stoiber, formerly the director of engineering at Shopify, will be joining the company to work on OpenAI’s long-rumored operating system, in what he describes as a “small high-agency team.”
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