Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and one of the most prominent researchers in artificial intelligence, announced Tuesday that he is joining rival AI lab Anthropic.
The hire is a significant win for Anthropic in the high-stakes competition for elite AI talent, as the company continues to attract respected technical figures from across the industry.
Mr. 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. He will also 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,” Mr. Karpathy said in a post on X.
Mr. 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. He is widely credited with popularizing the term “vibe coding” and has spoken publicly about shifting his own coding workflows toward heavy reliance on AI tools beginning around late 2025.
Since leaving Tesla in 2022, Mr. Karpathy has become one of AI’s most influential public educators, building a large 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 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, such as Mr. Karpathy, capable of advancing the frontier.
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