Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla AI executive and one of the founding members of OpenAI, has joined Anthropic as the competition among frontier AI developers intensifies.
Karpathy announced the move in a post on X, saying he was excited to return to research and development during what he described as a formative period for large language models.
At Anthropic, Karpathy has joined the company’s pretraining team, which oversees the massive training runs that give the Claude family of models their core capabilities and knowledge. The team is led by Nick Joseph, Anthropic’s head of pretraining.
Karpathy is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in modern AI. After studying under renowned Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li, he became one of OpenAI’s earliest employees before later joining Tesla, where he played a major role in the company’s self-driving and AI initiatives. He departed Tesla in 2022.
In 2024, Karpathy also launched Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education platform aimed at combining learning with advanced AI systems. He said he still plans to continue work in education alongside his new role.
His move adds to a growing list of senior AI figures leaving OpenAI for Anthropic. John Schulman joined Anthropic in 2024, while other high-profile departures from OpenAI have included former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former technology chief Mira Murati, who later founded Thinking Machines.
The hiring strengthens Anthropic as it competes with OpenAI and other frontier model developers to build increasingly advanced AI systems for enterprise and cloud computing markets.
