OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

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Renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy has officially joined Anthropic to focus on core research and development for LLMs.

May 19, 2026 12:24 EDT

Andrej Karpathy, one of the most influential researchers in modern AI, has joined Anthropic. Karpathy was a founding team member of OpenAI, where he worked as a research scientist in the company’s early years. His research background spans computer vision, deep learning, and multimodal AI, including work on image captioning and visual-semantic alignment before the current LLM boom.

Karpathy announced the update on X, writing:

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.

— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) May 19, 2026

After his initial stint at OpenAI, Elon Musk hired Karpathy to work at Tesla, where he served as the Director of AI and led the Autopilot Vision team. He was key in pushing Tesla towards a camera-first autonomous driving strategy while the rest of the industry was relying on Radar and Lidar. He left Tesla in 2022.

In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI, where he worked on AI research related to ChatGPT. He left OpenAI again in 2024. After that, he launched Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup aimed at building a new kind of AI-native learning experience.

For Anthropic, Karpathy’s arrival is a significant talent win as the company competes directly with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, xAI, and Meta in the race to build more capable frontier models. Karpathy’s post suggests he will focus on core R&D while pausing his education-focused work for now.

Andrej @karpathy is back in the game! I would have loved for him to rejoin @OpenAI, but I'm happy he's at any frontier lab pushing the field forward. It’s easy to frame this as zero-sum among the labs, but in truth we’re collectively advancing the most important tech of our era. https://t.co/BHoTBjPrd0

— Noam Brown (@polynoamial) May 19, 2026

At Anthropic, Karpathy will work to accelerate pre-training research under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is the initial stage of training a large language model, where the model is given vast amounts of data to learn language patterns, syntax, semantics, and world knowledge. It forms the foundation for subsequent fine-tuning and alignment.