OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic’s Pre-Training Team
Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s original 11 co-founders and among the most recognized AI researchers in the world, has joined Anthropic. The move is a significant talent coup for Anthropic as it races to stay at the frontier of large language model development.
Karpathy is joining Anthropic’s pre-training team, led by Nick Joseph, where he will build a brand-new group focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pre-training research. Pre-training, the massive compute-intensive phase that gives a frontier model its core knowledge and capabilities, is the single most expensive part of building systems like Claude. Finding ways to make that process faster could reshape the economics of the entire AI industry.
In an X post with over 13.6 million views, Karpathy expressed his belief that "the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative." He added that he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to resume that work in time.
The hire caps a career arc that has touched nearly every major inflection point in modern AI. Karpathy earned his PhD at Stanford under Fei-Fei Li, focusing on deep learning and computer vision. He co-founded OpenAI in 2015, where he worked on deep learning research before departing in 2017 to join Tesla as its director of AI.
At Tesla, Karpathy led the computer vision teams behind Full Self-Driving and Autopilot, the programs that underpin the electric carmaker’s ambitions for autonomous vehicles. He left in July 2022, returned to OpenAI for roughly a year, then departed again in 2024 to found Eureka Labs, a startup applying AI assistants to education.
The timing is notable. Anthropic has emerged as a magnet for top-tier technical talent at a moment when its chief rival, OpenAI, has experienced a string of high-profile departures. Over the past two years, OpenAI has lost more than a dozen senior executives and researchers.
For Anthropic, landing Karpathy signals that the company can attract talent of the highest calibre as it scales both its research and commercial operations. The firm, led by CEO Dario Amodei, has drawn investor interest at a valuation of roughly $800 billion.