Hire
Karpathy joins Anthropic
- Person
- Andrej Karpathy
- Announced
- Prior role
- Founder & CEO, Eureka Labs (formerly: Director of AI, Tesla; founding research scientist, OpenAI)
- New role
- Research Scientist, Pretraining Team, Anthropic
Why it matters
Anthropic has hired Andrej Karpathy — a founding member of OpenAI, former director of AI at Tesla, and one of the most widely read voices in the field — onto its pretraining team. Karpathy announced the move himself on X on May 19; Anthropic confirmed he will build a team using Claude to accelerate pretraining research, the large-scale training runs that give a model its core knowledge and capabilities. He reports into pretraining lead Nicholas Joseph, an early Anthropic employee.
The hire is a direct transfer of one of AI's highest-profile names from the OpenAI orbit to Anthropic. Karpathy co-founded OpenAI in 2015, left for Tesla, returned in 2023, left again in February 2024, and then ran Eureka Labs, an AI education company, before this move. His social media writing on language model research reaches roughly two million followers. Anthropic gains both the research capability and the public credibility that comes with his name.