Anthropic has hired Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla executive and one of the founding members of OpenAI, as competition intensifies in the artificial intelligence industry.
Karpathy announced the move on Tuesday in a post on X, saying he was excited to return to research and development during what he described as a formative period for large language models.
At Anthropic, Karpathy has joined the company’s pretraining team, which handles the large-scale training runs that provide the foundation for the capabilities of its Claude AI models. The team is led by Nick Joseph, Anthropic’s head of pretraining.
Karpathy previously played a major role in developing self-driving and AI technologies at Tesla before leaving the company in 2022. He studied under Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and was among the earliest employees at OpenAI before later joining Tesla.
In his social media post, Karpathy also said he remains committed to education and plans to continue work related to Eureka Labs, the AI-integrated education platform he announced in 2024.
Anthropic has been strengthening its research teams as it competes with companies such as OpenAI to develop advanced AI models for cloud providers and enterprise customers.
The company has already attracted several former OpenAI leaders, including John Schulman, who joined Anthropic in 2024. OpenAI has also seen the departures of former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former technology chief Mira Murati.