Zhixidongxi reported on June 7 that today, Clive Chan, OpenAI’s self-developed chip “Employee #002,” announced on X that he has left OpenAI and officially joined Anthropic this week.
In his resignation statement, Clive Chan reflected on his more than two years at OpenAI. He noted that he was the second hire on OpenAI’s hardware team and witnessed the entire journey of the company’s in-house chip project, from its early formation to its current progress. He praised the OpenAI chip team for its incredible density of talent, stating that he did not believe there was a better chip design team in the world.
Looking to the future, he is eager to see these chips grow into one of the most important engines of AGI.
However, Clive Chan also wrote that he could never shake the urge to once again climb a new high mountain from the base. It was precisely because of this that he ultimately chose to join Anthropic.
He mentioned being deeply impressed by Anthropic’s team, values, and ambition, and within just a few days of joining, he has already experienced an intense work pace, saying: “It’s time to build.”
After announcing his departure, Clive Chan was further questioned by netizens about the latest progress on OpenAI’s in-house chip project. He responded that, beyond the information already publicly disclosed by OpenAI, he cannot provide additional details.
However, he specifically mentioned the collaboration blog previously released by OpenAI and Broadcom. According to the information disclosed in the blog, the related deployment plan is targeted to begin in the second half of 2026. Clive Chan also noted that more developments on this front will soon become visible.
This blog was published in October 2025. At that time, OpenAI and Broadcom announced a strategic partnership to jointly build an OpenAI-designed AI accelerator system with a total capacity of 10 GW. OpenAI is responsible for chip and system design, while Broadcom handles the development and deployment of the accelerators and networking systems. The first racks are scheduled to begin delivery in the second half of 2026, with the entire project expected to continue until the end of 2029. This marks OpenAI’s first official disclosure of a clear timeline for its in-house AI chip project.
Looking closely at Clive Chan’s resume, he has worked or interned at prominent companies such as OpenAI, Tesla, Google, and SpaceX, with a long-standing focus on AI infrastructure.
Clive Chan graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2021. During his time at the university, he participated in the development of a student organization related to Hyperloop in Canada and served as a co-founder and advisor of the Canadian Hyperloop Conference.
Before and after graduation, he interned or worked at Google, SpaceX, and the quantum computing company QuEra. During his time at Google, he worked on machine learning infrastructure, and at SpaceX, he contributed to projects related to liquid rocket engines.
After graduation, he joined Tesla's Autopilot Deep Learning Infrastructure team, where he served as a Software Engineer and later as a Senior Software Engineer over nearly three years, focusing on GPU optimization, cluster scheduling, data center software, and training infrastructure.
In January 2024, Clive Chan officially joined OpenAI as a member of the technical team, focusing on matrix multiplication (Matmul), roofline analysis, and hardware-related tasks, while contributing to OpenAI’s in-house AI chip project.
After Clive Chan announced his joining of Anthropic, Tony CW Liu, an Anthropic employee responsible for GPU performance optimization, quickly appeared in the comments section to post: "Congrats and welcome!"
Meanwhile, this career move has also sparked plenty of jokes from netizens. One user commented: "Every time I see 'I've decided to leave OpenAI,' I know the next sentence will mention Anthropic."
Some netizens compared it to a football transfer: “It’s like leaving Real Madrid to join Barcelona.”
Another netizen questioned the phrase "climbing from the foot of the mountain" in Clive Chan's resignation statement. With Anthropic’s current valuation nearly at $1 trillion, how can it still be considered starting from the bottom?
On June 1, Anthropic announced the completion of its H-round financing, raising up to $65 billion (approximately RMB 439.77 billion), with a post-money valuation of $965 billion (approximately RMB 6.53 trillion)—just one step away from joining the $1 trillion club.
Conclusion: Talent mobility between OpenAI and Anthropic continues.
Today, Anthropic has become one of OpenAI’s most significant talent pipelines, with movement between the two companies—spanning researchers, product leads, and chip engineers—continuing to draw close attention.
In May of this year, Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and a renowned AI researcher, announced his departure to join Anthropic, sparking widespread discussion in the industry. A month later, Clive Chan, who had been involved in OpenAI’s in-house chip development project, also chose to join the company once considered a “competitor.”
For cutting-edge AI companies, talent remains one of the most critical assets. For Anthropic, which is continuously expanding its team, this list may continue to grow.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Zhixindong" (ID: zhidxcom), author: Jiang Yu.