OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic to Lead AI-Assisted Research Team

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team | TechCrunch

Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic. "I've joined Anthropic," Karpathy posted on X Tuesday. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D." Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. It's also one of the most expensive, compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model. An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. Tapping him to build such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI-assisted research, rather than pure compute, is how it stays competitive with OpenAI and Google. While at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he departed in 2017 to join Tesla. He led Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022. He then went back to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to applying AI assistants to education. Karpathy hasn't shared many updates on Eureka Labs since its launch, and it's not clear if the renowned researcher will continue with the startup. He has also taught an online course called Neural Networks: Zero to Hero that helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch in code, and has a YouTube channel where he semi-regularly posts lectures on LLMs and AI. "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time," Karpathy said. TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment. Separately, Anthropic has also brought on Chris Rohlf to its frontier red team, which stress-tests advanced AI models against severe threats. Rohlf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo's well-respected cybersecurity team known as "The Paranoids," and more recently at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rohlf was also a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where he worked on the CyberAI project. "We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cyber security with AI," Rohlf said in a post on X. "I can't think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment in time."

Former Tesla AI executive, OpenAI founding member Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

May 19 (Reuters) - Former Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab AI executive and one of OpenAI's founding members Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic, he said ⁠on Tuesday. "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I ⁠am very excited to join the team here and ⁠get back to R&D," he said ⁠in a post on X. Reporting ⁠by Zaheer Kachwala in Bengaluru; Editing by Vijay Kishore Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab * Suggested Topics: * Autos & Transportation * ADAS, AV & Safety * Supply Chain * Sustainable & EV Supply Chain

Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader

"I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," Karpathy wrote in a post on X, referring to large language models. "I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D." Anthropic said Karpathy starts this week and will be part of the pretraining team, which helps the company's Claude models acquire their core knowledge and capabilities. The company said Karpathy will be starting a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. It's the latest high-profile hire for Anthropic, which is poised to surpass OpenAI's private market valuation and is in an intensifying battle for talent with its chief AI rival. Ross Nordeen, a founding member of xAI and an ex-Tesla employee, announced earlier this month he was joining Anthropic, the same day the company struck a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX to rent compute capacity at xAI's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. After helping to start OpenAI, Karpathy left for Tesla in 2017 to serve as director of AI. There, he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot. Musk recruited Karpathy away from OpenAI while the Tesla CEO was a board member at both tech companies. Karpathy's work at OpenAI and Tesla came up repeatedly during the Musk v. Altman trial, which concluded on Monday, with the jury and judge ruling in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman's favor. In one email exchange that was presented as an exhibit during the proceedings, Musk described Karpathy as "arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision," behind Ilya Sutskever, another OpenAI co-founder. "The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done...," Musk wrote, regarding his hiring of Karpathy. Karpathy was one of several OpenAI employees Musk borrowed from OpenAI to do months of free work at Tesla, where the development of self-driving vehicles wasn't going as quickly as promised. Karpathy left Tesla in 2022, and the company still doesn't sell a vehicle that's safe to use without a human driver ready to steer or brake at all times. After leaving Tesla, Karpathy briefly went back to OpenAI before starting AI education startup Eureka Labs, where he has worked until now. Karpathy holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford.

OpenAI Cofounder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic as Sam Altman's Fortunes Turn

Anthropic was founded by OpenAI exiles. It's adding one more. On Tuesday, former OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy announced on X that he will be joining Anthropic, seemingly to work on the lab's research and development team. "Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," he wrote. "I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time." Karpathy had an on-again, off-again relationship with OpenAI, serving as a founding member of the group and research scientist from 2015 to 2017, before Elon Musk poached him to serve as Tesla's director of artificial intelligence. He rejoined OpenAI in 2023 and hung on for about a year before stepping away again in the wake of the very dramatic and short-lived ouster of Sam Altman as CEOâ€"though Karpathy denied his exit had anything to do with that whole situation. It's hard not to read Karpathy's move to Anthropic in the context of the Cold War between the two major frontier labs. Not only is Anthropic made up largely of OpenAI send-offs, but it's also started to act in an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" fashion. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced that it was going to start using computing power made available by SpaceX (née xAI) despite the fact that CEO Elon Musk has repeatedly referred to the company as "evil." Turns out he must think it is less evil than a Sam Altman-led OpenAI, and given that his lawsuit to punish Altman failed, might as well lend support to his biggest rival. Karpathy, the creator of the term "vibe coding," will reportedly be joining Anthropic's pre-training lab, per Axios, and will help to launch a new team that will be focused on using Claude, the company's flagship AI model, to accelerate pre-training research. Just how that'll go, we'll have to see. Karpathy's credentials are pretty much unassailable, but he's certainly gotten a bit high off the supply of AI hype at times. He called Moltbook, the social network for AI agents, “genuinely the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing I have seen recentlyâ€â€"only for it to be revealed that most of the content on the site was actually human-generated. Earlier this year, he described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" and said that he's embraced "tokenmaxxing," the practice of using as many tokens as possible to maximize your AI use, whether it's actually necessary or not. Whether Anthropic is getting industry icon Karpathy or AI slop-ified Karpathy, simply getting him is something of a coup for the company in terms of attracting talent. It signals that the serious minds in the space are gravitating toward Anthropicâ€"or at least away from Altman. Whatever the price tag to bring him in might be, it could be worth it simply to bolster the perception that Anthropic is the place to be.

OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

Why it matters: The hire is a major coup for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent -- and another sign the company is emerging as a magnet for some of the industry's most respected technical minds. Driving the news: Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. * Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research -- an increasingly important frontier as AI companies race to automate parts of AI development. * "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," Karpathy said in a post on X. Between the lines: Karpathy is a rare AI figure with credibility across research, industry and education. * He was a founding member of OpenAI before serving as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot. * Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December -- embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models. Zoom out: Since leaving Tesla in 2022, Karpathy has become one of AI's most influential public educators, building a massive following through technical explainers and educational content on YouTube and X. * He said Tuesday that he remains "deeply passionate about education" and plans to return to that work "in time." The bottom line: The AI race is often framed around massive funding rounds and scarce computing power. Just as important is the fierce competition for the small pool of researchers -- like Karpathy -- capable of advancing the frontier.

Influential AI researcher Andrej Karpathy announces he's joining Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, the influential 39-year-old Slovak-Canadian AI researcher and one of the original 11 co-founders of OpenAI, and former head of Tesla's AI division, announced on Tuesday, May 19 that he's joining rival lab Anthropic. As Karpathy posted from his account on the social network X: "Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time." Anthropic's current Head of Pretraining, Nicholas Joseph, also a former OpenAI alumnus, added more context to Karpathy's new role at Anthropic in a post of his own on X, writing: Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He'll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can't think of anyone better suited to do it -- looking forward to what we build together!" The announcement came on the same day as the start of rival AI-focused tech firm Google's annual I/O developer conference in its headquarters city of Mountain View, California, when many new releases and announcements were expected. Karpathy's storied history Karpathy is widely known for spanning three parts of the modern AI boom: academic research, big-company deployment and online education. His own website describes him as an AI researcher and educator who was a founding member of OpenAI, later served as Director of AI at Tesla, and helped create Stanford's first deep learning course, CS231n. OpenAI's December 2015 launch announcement also listed Karpathy among the group's founding members. At Tesla, where he worked from 2017 to 2022, Karpathy led the computer vision team for Autopilot and says his team handled in-house data labeling, neural network training and deployment on Tesla's custom inference chip. He then returned to OpenAI from 2023 to 2024, where his website says he built a team focused on midtraining and synthetic data generation -- experience directly relevant to Anthropic's reported pretraining role. Karpathy's academic work began at Stanford, where he earned his PhD under Fei-Fei Li and focused on neural networks for computer vision, natural language processing and the intersection of the two. He also interned at Google Brain, Google Research and DeepMind, according to his website. His education includes an MSc from the University of British Columbia and a BSc from the University of Toronto, where he double-majored in computer science and physics. What will become of Karpathy's open source research and commitment to AI education? Since leaving OpenAI in 2024, Karpathy has become one of AI's most visible public educators, publishing technical and general-audience videos on large language models and neural networks. He also launched Eureka Labs in July 2024 as an "AI-native" school; its first product, LLM101n, is described as an undergraduate-level course guiding students through training their own AI system. Acting on his own as a free agent over the last two years, Karpathy has also helped push open source AI research forward with products and standards including autoresearch, an LLM-driven automated researcher that can run multiple hypothesis and experiments simultaneously, and the LLM Knowledge Base, an autonomous system of storing memory and context for AI agents in a kind of ever-growing library designed for them to access. The big question is what becomes of these and Karpathy's open source AI efforts more generally as he joins Anthropic, a lab that has supported open source via the launch of its Model Context Protocol (MCP) technical standard, but which also famously has shipped primarily proprietary AI models and harnesses (such as Claude and Claude Code). Based on the last statement in his announcement post on X -- "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time" -- it appears that at least his contributions to the AI-native school effort will be paused as he digs in at Anthropic.

Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI founding member and inventor of 'vibe coding,' defects to Anthropic | Fortune

"Personal update: I've joined Anthropic," Andrej Karpathy wrote onX on Tuesday, in a post that drew nearly 3 million views within one hour. He said the next few years at the frontier of LLMs would be "especially formative" and that he was eager to get back to research. He started this week on the pre-training team. The decision suggests that Karpathy, whose writing on AI is followed by nearly two million people on X, has decided to put his stake in the AI race. He was first a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, left to run AI at Tesla, came back in 2023, and left only a year later to start his own education company, Eureka Labs. Karpathy has been well known in AI for a decade, but the thing -- or phrase -- that etched him into AI legend was a tweet from last year. In February 2025, he posted that there was a "new kind of coding" that he called vibe coding: describe what you want plainly and let the model do the work. The phrase escaped the industry and infected the business world, which turned its back against software companies and raced to develop its own bespoke agents, touching off the much-debated "SaaSpocalypse" in its wake. (What wasn't debated is that tens of billions of dollars in stock valuations evaporated as firms tried to "vibe code" their own solutions.) Collins Dictionary named it Word of the Year. The model he cited in that original tweet was Anthropic's. As an Anthropic employee, Karpathy will be building on the work from another viral post. In March, he wired up an AI coding agent, handed it a single small language model, and let it run unsupervised for two days, testing and tweaking the training code on its own. After 700 experiments and 20 self-found optimizations, he said the same tweaks applied to a larger model cut training time by 11%. This, he said, was called autoresearch-"Part code, part sci-fi, and a pinch of psychosis" he wrote with a smiley face. The method would come to be known as "the Karpathy Loop." Teaching that method looks, more or less, like his new job. According to Anthropic, Karpathy will be starting a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research; the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. He sits on a team led by Nick Joseph. Long before any of this, though, Karpathy was famous for something else: his Rubik's Cube skills. He ran a YouTube channel called "badmephisto," where a generation of competitive cubers learned to "speedcube" by seeing the cube as 26 individual "cubies" rather than 54 colored stickers. By sticking to the small structure, he could move the whole thing. He solved a Rubik's Cube in about 17 seconds. Certainly the puzzles for Karpathy got harder; neural nets and then language models, but the method never really changed. Get a small enough system fully under control, and you can move something much bigger.

Why OpenAI Cofounder Andrej Karpathy Just Joined Its Fiercest Rival

In a post on X, Karpathy confirmed that he had joined Anthropic, and said that "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time." An Anthropic spokesperson told Inc. that Karapthy will join Anthropic's pretraining team, which handles the initial large-scale training runs that imbue AI models with knowledge and an understanding of agentic capabilities. Within pretraining, the company says, Karpathy will lead a group focused on using Claude to accelerate research. Anthropic says that Karpathy started at Anthropic earlier this week. Karpathy is one of the most famous (and beloved) AI researchers of his generation. He cofounded OpenAI in 2015 alongside AI luminaries including Sam Altman and Elon Musk. From 2017 to 2022, he served as the director of AI at Tesla, then briefly returned to OpenAI between 2023 and 2024.

OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic - The Economic Times

Renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic, marking a significant talent acquisition for the AI company. Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former Director of AI at Tesla, expressed excitement about contributing to LLM research and development. He also plans to continue his work in AI education.Renowned researcher Andrej Karpathy announced on social media on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic, in a major talent win for the artificial intelligence (AI) giant. Karpathy, a major figure in modern deep learning, previously cofounded OpenAI and served as the director of AI at Tesla, where he led the Autopilot computer vision team. In a personal update sharing the news, Karpathy said, "Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time." He had recently been focusing on his AI education startup Eureka Labs.