(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.