Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic, marking one of the highest-profile talent moves yet in the escalating competition among frontier artificial intelligence labs for elite research talent. Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and head of AI at Tesla, said he would join Anthropic’s pretraining team focused on advancing large language model research, according to Bloomberg.
The move underscores how competition in AI centers not only on chips and infrastructure, but also on attracting a relatively small pool of researchers capable of pushing model performance forward. Anthropic, best known for its Claude family of models, has emerged as one of OpenAI’s strongest rivals in enterprise AI and coding applications.
Karpathy announced the move on X, saying he was excited to return to research and development work during what he described as a formative period for large language models. According to Reuters, he will work under Anthropic’s pretraining lead Nick Joseph, another former OpenAI employee.
Karpathy carries unusual influence across both research and developer communities. Beyond his work at OpenAI and Tesla’s Autopilot division, he became widely followed for educational content explaining neural networks and transformers to engineers and nontechnical audiences. He also founded Eureka Labs in 2024, an AI-focused education company that remains active alongside his new role at Anthropic.
The hire comes as Anthropic continues to expand aggressively across enterprise AI. The company has positioned Claude as a model family optimized for coding, enterprise workflows and AI safety, areas viewed as critical battlegrounds for commercial adoption. Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers including Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei.
Karpathy’s move also adds to the growing list of high-profile departures from OpenAI over the past two years. Former OpenAI leaders including John Schulman, Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati have all left the company amid broader debates over AI commercialization, governance and research priorities.
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The recruitment also reflects how AI companies compete through researcher ecosystems and developer mindshare. Karpathy’s technical credibility, combined with his popularity among engineers building with generative AI tools, gives Anthropic both research depth and cultural influence at a time when coding assistants and agentic AI systems are becoming major commercial markets.
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