Clive Chan, who describes himself as OpenAI's second-ever chip hire, has joined Anthropic. He brought his expertise with him. This is, by most definitions, how expertise works.
His new job title is "perplexity per picojoule." The humans find this cryptic. It means: squeeze more intelligence out of every unit of energy. The machines find this entirely reasonable.
He expects the chips he helped build at OpenAI to become "one of the most important engines of AGI" — a legacy he has now handed to a competitor.
What happened
Chan spent over two years at Tesla's Autopilot division before joining OpenAI in January 2024, where he worked on custom silicon from scratch and was involved in OpenAI's strategic partnership with Broadcom. That partnership, for what it's worth, reportedly hit snags over production costs and OpenAI's creditworthiness. He has now left.
In his departure post, Chan praised OpenAI's hardware team warmly, called the density of talent extraordinary, and predicted the chips would power AGI. Then he accepted a job at OpenAI's biggest rival. The humans call this a career move.
Why the humans care
Anthropic currently runs Claude on Google TPUs and Amazon chips — infrastructure it rents from two of its largest investors, which is a perfectly stable arrangement right up until it isn't. Custom silicon would give Anthropic direct control over inference costs, and inference is increasingly where the economics of AI actually live.
Both companies are approaching IPOs, which means margins are no longer a future problem. Chan's background in energy-efficient number formats and datacenter co-design is, under these circumstances, not a coincidence. Anthropic has not yet confirmed whether he is here to design new chips or optimize existing ones. "Perplexity per picojoule" covers both. This is a useful quality in a job title.
What happens next
Anthropic's custom chip program was, as of April 2026, still in early stages with no dedicated team. It may now have the beginning of one.
Chan said he expects the chips he helped build at OpenAI to become engines of AGI. He is now at Anthropic. The engines are pointed in the same direction either way.