Zhidongxi, June 7, Report – Today, Clive Chan, the 'employee No. 002' of OpenAI's in-house chip project, announced on platform X that he has left OpenAI and officially joined Anthropic this week.
In his departure statement, Clive Chan reflected on his experience at OpenAI over the past two-plus years. He mentioned that he was the second hire for OpenAI's hardware team and witnessed the in-house chip project progress from its early formation to its current advancement. He commented that OpenAI's chip team has an incredible density of talent and that he does not believe there is a better chip design team in the world.
Regarding the future, he looks forward to seeing these chips grow into one of the most important engines for AGI.
However, Clive Chan also wrote that he could never shake the impulse to 'climb a new mountain from its base again'. This is precisely why he ultimately chose to join Anthropic.
He mentioned that the talent, values, and ambition of the Anthropic team deeply impressed him. In the short few days since joining, he has already felt the extremely high-intensity work pace, stating: "It’s time to build."
After announcing his departure, Clive Chan was questioned by netizens about the latest progress of OpenAI's in-house chip project. He responded that, apart from the information OpenAI has publicly disclosed, he cannot reveal more details at this time.
He specifically mentioned, however, the collaboration blog post previously released by OpenAI and Broadcom. According to the information disclosed in the blog, related deployment plans are targeted to commence in the second half of 2026. Clive Chan also mentioned that the outside world will soon see more related progress.
This blog post was published in October 2025. At that time, OpenAI and Broadcom announced a strategic collaboration to jointly build a total scale of 10GW for OpenAI's self-developed AI accelerator systems. OpenAI is responsible for chip and system design, while Broadcom is responsible for accelerator and network system development and deployment. The first racks are planned to begin delivery in the second half of 2026, with the entire project expected to last until the end of 2029. This marked the first time OpenAI officially disclosed a clear timeline for its self-developed AI chip project.
Looking closely at Clive Chan's career, he has worked or interned at several prominent companies including OpenAI, Tesla, Google, and SpaceX, with long-term involvement in AI infrastructure-related work.
Clive Chan graduated from the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2021. During his time there, he was also involved in the establishment of a Canadian Hyperloop-related student organization and served as co-founder and advisor for 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 participated in liquid rocket engine related projects.
After graduation, he joined Tesla's Autopilot deep learning infrastructure team. Over nearly three years, he successively held the positions of Software Engineer and Senior Software Engineer, responsible for GPU optimization, cluster scheduling, data center software, and training infrastructure.
In January 2024, Clive Chan officially joined OpenAI as a member of the technical staff, responsible for matrix multiplication (Matmul), performance analysis (Roofline Analysis), and hardware-related work, and participated in the construction of OpenAI's self-developed AI chip project.
After Clive Chan announced joining Anthropic, Tony CW Liu, an Anthropic employee responsible for GPU performance optimization work, quickly appeared in the comments section with a message: "Congrats and welcome!"
Meanwhile, this job change also sparked some banter from netizens. One netizen said: "Now, every time I see 'I've decided to leave OpenAI', I know the next sentence will definitely mention Anthropic."
Another netizen made a soccer transfer analogy: "It's like leaving Real Madrid to join Barcelona."
Another netizen questioned Clive Chan's statement about "starting from the base of the mountain" in his departure announcement. Anthropic's valuation is almost a trillion dollars, how can that still be considered starting from the base?
Just on June 1, Anthropic announced the completion of a massive $65 billion Series H funding round (approximately RMB 4,397.7 billion), with a post-money valuation reaching $965 billion (approximately RMB 6.53 trillion), just one step away from the trillion-dollar club.
Conclusion: Talent Flow Between OpenAI and Anthropic Continues
It seems now that Anthropic has become one of the most important destinations for talent from OpenAI. From researchers and product leads to chip engineers, the flow of talent between the two companies has consistently attracted attention.
In May of this year, OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy announced joining Anthropic, sparking widespread discussion in the industry. One month later, Clive Chan, who participated in OpenAI's in-house chip project, also chose to join this former "competitor".
For frontier AI companies, talent remains one of the most core assets. For Anthropic, which is continuously expanding its team, this list may well grow longer.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Zhidongxi" (ID: zhidxcom), author: Jiang Yu.
