Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former senior director of artificial intelligence at Tesla, has joined Anthropic, the company confirmed this week. <cite index="1-7">Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph.</cite> He announced the move in a post on X on May 19, 2026.
Role and mandate
<cite index="1-9">An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.</cite> Pre-training refers to the initial, compute-intensive phase in which a large language model (LLM) ingests vast text, code, and multimodal datasets to develop its base capabilities. <cite index="1-16,1-17">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.</cite>
The new team's remit reflects a broader industry trend toward AI-assisted research. <cite index="6-12">In practical terms, this could involve automating experiment design, identifying model failures faster, generating synthetic training data and improving the feedback loops researchers use during large-scale training runs.</cite> <cite index="1-11">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.</cite>
Background
Karpathy's career closely tracks the modern era of deep learning. <cite index="1-12,1-13">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.</cite> <cite index="1-14">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.</cite> <cite index="1-15">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.</cite> In his X post, he wrote that he remains committed to education and plans to resume that work in time.
He will report to Nick Joseph, himself a former OpenAI researcher who moved to Anthropic in its early days. <cite index="2-18">Alongside Joseph, Karpathy will share water cooler chats with AI luminary John Schulman, also previously part of the OpenAI co-founder group and a man whose own blog lists his core interests in robotics and reinforcement learning.</cite>
Talent competition
The hire arrives as Anthropic continues to scale aggressively. <cite index="5-12">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.</cite> <cite index="5-13">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.</cite> Separately, <cite index="1-19,1-20,1-21">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.</cite>
Karpathy's departure also extends a multi-year pattern of senior OpenAI researchers leaving for rival labs. <cite index="2-19">OpenAI has also hemorrhaged its chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever (now chief scientist at Safe Superintelligence Inc) and its former CTO Mira Murati (now co-founder and CEO at Thinking Machines Lab) in the last couple of years.</cite> Karpathy's earlier work at OpenAI and Tesla also surfaced as evidence during the Musk v. Altman trial, which concluded on May 18, 2026.