Former Tesla AI Director and OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Moves to Anthropic

TLDR

• Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI director, has joined Anthropic
• He will work on the pretraining team, focused on large-scale training runs for Claude
• Karpathy will build a team using Claude to accelerate pretraining research
• Anthropic recently raised money at a $61.5 billion valuation, surpassing OpenAI’s valuation
• He says he plans to resume his work in education “in time”

Andrej Karpathy, one of the most well-known names in AI research, announced on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic. He made the announcement in a post on X.

Karpathy is a founding member of OpenAI, where he worked as a research scientist from 2015 to 2017. He later became director of AI at Tesla, a role he held from 2017 to 2022.

Karpathy’s Background in AI

At Tesla, he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot. He also worked on training and deploying Tesla’s customer inference chip.

He returned to OpenAI in 2023, where he led a team focused on midtraining and synthetic data generation. He left that role in 2024.

Karpathy earned his doctorate in computer science from Stanford University. Anthropic has described him as one of the top AI researchers in the world.

He is also known for coining the term “vibe coding,” a phrase that has spread widely in tech circles.

What He Will Do at Anthropic

At Anthropic, Karpathy joins the pretraining team. This team runs the large-scale training that gives Claude its core capabilities and knowledge base.

He will build a new team focused on using Claude to speed up pretraining research. This is a key area of AI development.

Karpathy also said he remains passionate about education. He plans to return to that work at some point.

Anthropic is the maker of Claude, its flagship AI assistant. The company competes directly with OpenAI in the large language model space.

Anthropic is currently valued at around $61.5 billion following its most recent fundraising round. That valuation puts it ahead of OpenAI and close to Tesla’s current market value.

The company is also reported to be planning a public offering this year, which would make it one of the most watched IPOs in the tech sector.

Karpathy’s move to Anthropic follows a pattern seen across the AI industry, with top researchers shifting between the major labs.

His joining adds a high-profile name to Anthropic’s research team at a time when the company is scaling up its operations.

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