Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy joined Anthropic on May 19, 2026, the AI researcher and former Tesla director said on X. He will work on the Claude pretraining team, focusing on accelerating large-language-model (LLM) pretraining research and near-term R&D.

Karpathy’s Role and Background

Karpathy announced on X that he had joined Anthropic and expressed excitement about returning to research and development. He said he plans to resume education-focused work in time but will concentrate on R&D at Anthropic in the near term. The company confirmed he will join its pretraining team, reporting to Nicholas Joseph, an early Anthropic employee and former OpenAI staffer. Karpathy will build a team using Anthropic’s Claude models to accelerate pretraining research.

Karpathy is a founding research scientist of OpenAI and one of its original 11 co-founders. He served as Tesla’s director of AI from 2017 to 2022, leading the Autopilot computer-vision effort. After rejoining OpenAI in 2023, he left again in February 2024 and founded Eureka Labs, an AI education venture.

No financial terms, equity stakes, or formal title beyond his team placement have been disclosed. Secondary-market indications place Anthropic’s valuation above $1 trillion, but no official filings or regulatory approvals have been reported in connection with the hire.

Karpathy has maintained a visible profile in tech communities, popularizing the term “vibe coding” in early 2025 and more recently promoting “agentic engineering” to describe AI agents that write code under human oversight. His hire is viewed as a significant talent acquisition in the competition among frontier AI labs.