The frontier AI labs now all have models that seem to be roughly at par with each other, but there’s one lab that seems to stand out from the rest, as far as culture is concerned.
While the AI industry has been marked by high-profile departures and internal upheaval, Anthropic remains the sole major AI laboratory to retain its entire founding team. All seven co-founders—Dario Amodei (CEO), Daniela Amodei (President), Jared Kaplan, Jack Clark, Sam McCandlish, Benjamin Mann, and Chris Olah—continue to work at the company they established in 2021.
This stability stands in stark contrast to the widespread founder attrition plaguing Anthropic’s competitors.
OpenAI: 8 out of 11 co-founders have left
OpenAI has experienced the most dramatic exodus in the industry. Of the eleven co-founders who launched the company in 2015, only three remain: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Wojciech Zaremba.
The departed co-founders include Elon Musk, who left and is now suing the organization; Ilya Sutskever, whose exit followed a failed leadership challenge and who went on to found SSI; Trevor Blackwell and Vicki Cheung, who both left in 2017; Andrej Karpathy, who also departed in 2017; Durk Kingma, who left in 2018 and joined Google before eventually moving to Anthropic; John Schulman, who departed to co-found Thinking Machines; and Pamela Vagata, who left in 2016.
xAI: 3 out of 12 co-founders have left
Despite being one of the newest entrants to the AI race, Elon Musk’s xAI has already seen significant turnover. The original twelve co-founders included Musk alongside Igor Babuschkin, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Kyle Kosic, Manuel Kroiss, Greg Yang, Zihang Dai, Toby Pohlen, Christian Szegedy, Guodong Zhang, Jimmy Ba, and Ross Nordeen.
Three have since departed: Igor Babuschkin left in August 2025 to launch Babuschkin Ventures, a VC firm focused on safe AI; Kyle Kosic departed in 2024 to join OpenAI; and Christian Szegedy also left in 2024 for a role at Morph Labs.
Thinking Machines: 3 out of 6 co-founders have left
Thinking Machines, co-founded by former OpenAI CEO Mira Murati, has lost half of its founding team. The original six co-founders were Mira Murati (CEO), John Schulman (Co-founder & Chief Scientist), Barrett Zoph (Co-founder & CTO), Lilian Weng (Co-founder), Andrew Tulloch (Co-founder), and Luke Metz (Co-founder).
Barrett Zoph, Andrew Tulloch, and Luke Metz have all departed the company. Barret Zoph and Luke Metz have rejoined OpenAI, and Andrew Tulloch has joined Meta.
Safe Superintelligence Inc.: 1 out of 3 co-founders have left
SSI was founded by three prominent AI researchers: Ilya Sutskever (former OpenAI Chief Scientist), Daniel Gross (ex-Apple AI lead and Y Combinator partner), and Daniel Levy (former OpenAI researcher and investor).
Daniel Gross left for Meta in 2025, leaving Sutskever and Levy to continue the mission.
Google DeepMind: 1 out of 3 co-founders have left
Even Google DeepMind, one of the more stable organizations in the field, has experienced founder attrition. Of the three original co-founders—Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman—Suleyman departed to join Microsoft, where he now leads AI initiatives.
Beyond its intact founding team, Anthropic has cultivated a reputation for unusually low attrition rates. Industry sources indicate that employees are rarely poached away to rivals, suggesting a level of satisfaction and commitment that has become increasingly rare in the competitive AI sector.
The retention of Anthropic’s entire founding team may reflect more than just employee satisfaction. It could possibly signal alignment on the company’s core mission around AI safety and constitutional AI, a shared vision that has weathered the intense pressures and lucrative opportunities that have fractured leadership teams elsewhere in the industry. And as the race to develop artificial general intelligence intensifies, Anthropic’s organizational stability presents a counternarrative to the notion that rapid growth and breakthrough innovation require constant leadership churn. Whether this cohesion proves to be a competitive advantage remains to be seen, but in an industry defined by volatility, it certainly makes the company an outlier.