Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI executive and early OpenAI team member, said on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic, bolstering the company behind Claude as it competes in the AI race.
“I have 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 said in an X post.
Karpathy, a prominent figure in the AI community:
Karpathy, a prominent figure in the AI community, previously helped develop Tesla’s self-driving and AI systems before departing the company in 2022. According to Anthropic, he has now joined its pretraining team, which handles large-scale training runs that form the foundation of Claude’s capabilities. He began this week and reports to Nick Joseph, the company’s head of pretraining.
He studied under Stanford AI researcher Fei-Fei Li and was among the early employees at OpenAI before later moving to Tesla. Another OpenAI co-founder, John Schulman, joined Anthropic in 2024. In recent years, OpenAI has also seen several senior departures, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former CTO Mira Murati, who went on to found the AI startup Thinking Machines.
Andrej Karpathy is widely regarded as one of the leading names in the technology industry and was featured in Time magazine’s 2024 list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI.
He is also credited with popularising the phrase “vibe coding,” a term used to describe building apps and writing software through simple natural-language instructions.
Andrej Karpathy’s professional journey:
Andrej Karpathy began his journey at OpenAI as one of its early research scientists, working there from 2015 to 2017. He then moved to Tesla, where he headed the Autopilot computer vision division as Director of AI.
In 2023, Karpathy rejoined OpenAI for a short period and publicly supported CEO Sam Altman during the company’s leadership turmoil. He stepped away from OpenAI again in February 2024 before launching Eureka Labs, a venture centred on technology-driven education.
Anthropic continues to face intense competition from other leading AI labs
Meanwhile, Anthropic continues to face intense competition from other leading AI labs, including OpenAI, as companies race to build more advanced models for cloud platforms and enterprise use.
Anthropic has secured investment from companies such as Amazon and Google, as rivalry grows among AI firms developing next-generation models and enterprise-focused AI tools.