Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's team

Andrej Karpathy said on May 19 that he had joined Anthropic, giving the Claude developer one of the best-known researchers to emerge from OpenAI’s founding ranks. Karpathy announced the move in a post on X, saying, “I’ve joined Anthropic” and that “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.” Anthropic said he started this week and returned to research and development work after leaving OpenAI in 2024 to launch education startup Eureka Labs. (money.usnews.com) Reuters and TechCrunch reported the move, and Anthropic confirmed his role on its pretraining team. ### What job is Karpathy taking at Anthropic? Anthropic said Karpathy joined its pretraining team, the group responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude models their core knowledge and capabilities. (anthropic.com) The company said he sits on the team led by Nick Joseph, Anthropic’s head of pretraining. TechCrunch reported that Karpathy will also build a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research. Pretraining is one of the most compute-intensive stages of building a frontier model, according to TechCrunch’s account of Anthropic’s description of the work. CNBC separately reported that Anthropic described the unit as central to how Claude acquires its base capabilities. (money.usnews.com) ### What did Karpathy say about the move? Karpathy wrote on X on May 19 that he was “very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.” In the same post, he said he remained “deeply passionate about education” and planned to resume that work later, a reference to Eureka Labs, the AI-integrated education platform he announced in 2024. Reuters said he had framed the next few years in large language models as especially formative. (money.usnews.com) Karpathy’s public profile extends beyond his executive roles. Reuters said he studied under Stanford computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, while TechCrunch noted his online teaching work, including the “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero” course and lectures on large language models. (techcrunch.com) ### Why is this hire drawing attention across the AI industry? Karpathy was one of OpenAI’s earliest staffers before leaving in 2017 for Tesla, where he led work on Autopilot and Full Self-Driving before departing in 2022. He later returned to OpenAI for about a year and left again in 2024. Reuters described him as a highly influential member of the AI community, and CNBC said his work at OpenAI and Tesla surfaced repeatedly in the recently concluded Musk v. (money.usnews.com) Altman trial. John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, left for Anthropic in 2024, Reuters reported. CNBC also said Ross Nordeen, a founding member of xAI and former Tesla employee, joined Anthropic earlier this month. (money.usnews.com) ### What else has Anthropic done 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 and one that had powered Anthropic’s official SDKs since the API’s early days. Anthropic said on May 14 that it had also formed a $200 million partnership with the Gates Foundation spanning grant funding, Claude usage credits and technical support over four years. (money.usnews.com) TechCrunch reported separately that Chris Rohlf, a cybersecurity veteran most recently at Meta, also joined Anthropic’s frontier red team this week. CNBC reported on May 6 that Anthropic had signed a compute deal with SpaceX to use capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. (money.usnews.com) ### What comes next for Karpathy at Anthropic? This week is Karpathy’s start date on Anthropic’s pretraining team, according to Anthropic, and TechCrunch reported that he is expected to build a Claude-focused research group inside that organization. Anthropic has not publicly given a launch date for that team or disclosed specific projects. Karpathy said in his May 19 post that he plans to return to education work in time, but neither he nor Anthropic has outlined a timetable beyond his immediate role in pretraining research. (anthropic.com) (money.usnews.com) (techcrunch.com)