Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy said on May 19 that he had joined Anthropic, returning to frontier-model research after stints at OpenAI, Tesla and, most recently, his education startup Eureka Labs. Anthropic confirmed to CNBC and TechCrunch that Karpathy started this week and will work on the company’s pretraining effort, the part of model development that gives Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy wrote in a post on X. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.” (cnbc.com) The hire lands during a busy month for Anthropic. The company said on May 18 that it was acquiring developer-tools company Stainless, and its newsroom shows a May 19 strategic alliance with KPMG covering deployment of Claude across the consulting firm’s business and workforce of more than 276,000. (anthropic.com) Anthropic has also announced partnerships this month with PwC, the Gates Foundation and others as it pushes Claude deeper into enterprise use. ### What job is Karpathy taking at Anthropic? Anthropic said Karpathy is joining the pretraining team and will build a group focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. CNBC reported the company said he starts this week; TechCrunch reported he is working on pretraining under team lead Nick Joseph. (cnbc.com) Pretraining is the large-scale training phase that gives frontier models their base capabilities and is one of the most compute-intensive parts of building them. Karpathy said in his X post that he had joined Anthropic and planned to “get back to R&D.” He also said he remained “deeply passionate about education” and planned to resume that work later, signaling that his public teaching work may continue in some form. (anthropic.com) ### Why does his move stand out inside the AI industry? Karpathy was one of OpenAI’s founding members and later left in 2017 for Tesla, where he led the computer vision team for Autopilot, according to CNBC. TechCrunch reported that after leaving Tesla in 2022, he returned to OpenAI for about a year before departing again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a company focused on AI and education. (cnbc.com) Reuters reported on May 19 that his move strengthens Anthropic as the Claude maker competes with OpenAI and others for talent. CNBC separately described the hire as the latest in a series of prominent additions, noting that Ross Nordeen, a founding member of xAI and former Tesla employee, also said earlier this month that he was joining Anthropic. (techcrunch.com) ### What else has Anthropic announced this month? Anthropic said on May 18 that it was acquiring Stainless, a company it described as a leader in SDKs and MCP server tooling. In the announcement, Anthropic said Stainless had powered every official Anthropic SDK since the early days of its API and that the deal would help Claude connect to more data and tools. (cnbc.com) Anthropic’s newsroom lists a May 19 alliance with KPMG, a May 14 deployment announcement with PwC, a May 14 $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation, and a May 6 compute deal with SpaceX. Those updates show the company pairing research hiring with enterprise and infrastructure expansion. (money.usnews.com) ### What has Karpathy said publicly about the move? Karpathy wrote on X on May 19: “Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic.” In the same post, he said the next few years in large language models would be “especially formative” and that he was excited to return to research and development. (anthropic.com) Anthropic has not, in the material reviewed, published a standalone newsroom post about Karpathy’s hiring. The next public markers are likely to be appearances in Anthropic research posts, product updates or team announcements as he begins work on pretraining this week under Nick Joseph’s group. (techcrunch.com) (anthropic.com)