Former OpenAI VP of Research Max Schwarzer Joins Anthropic On March 3, 2026, Max Schwarzer, former Vice President of Research and Head of Post-training at OpenAI, officially announced his departure on X. He will be joining Anthropic, a key competitor, as an Individual Contributor (IC), returning to frontline research in Reinforcement Learning (RL). Key Achievements at OpenAI Over the past few years, Max Schwarzer has been deeply involved in and led several groundbreaking milestones at OpenAI: - Led the release of next-gen models: Over the past year, he led the post-training team to successfully launch the GPT-5, 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3-Codex series models. - Pioneered inference paradigms and the o-series models: Collaborated with @MillionInt to create inference paradigms, expanding test-time compute. - Contributed to RL algorithm development with the "Strawberry Team": Worked with the team on post-training for o1-preview, o1, and o3. He expressed high praise for OpenAI's talent density, extended special thanks to key executives like Sam Altman (@sama) for their support, and stated that the current team is fully equipped to continue achieving success.