Feb 5 (Reuters) - John Schulman, an OpenAI co-founder

who joined Anthropic last year, has left his role at the

artificial intelligence startup, the company said late on

Wednesday.

"We are sad to see John go but fully support his decision to

pursue new opportunities and wish him all the very best," Jared

Kaplan, Anthropic's chief science officer, said in an emailed

statement to Reuters.

Schulman joined Anthropic after leaving OpenAI in August to

deepen his focus on AI alignment, and return to hands-on

technical work.

Anthropic, a major competitor of OpenAI in the AI foundation

model space, has annualized revenue hit about $875 million,

sells access to its models directly and through third-party

cloud services including Amazon Web Services.

The Information earlier reported on Schulman leaving the AI

firm.