Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former senior executive at Tesla, has joined the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
He announced the move on X on Tuesday, stating he is returning to research and development work.
Role at Anthropic
Karpathy began his position this week, working on the pre-training team under team lead Nick Joseph. The pre-training team is responsible for large-scale training runs that provide the Claude AI models with their core knowledge and capabilities. Karpathy is expected to form a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.
Professional Background
Karpathy co-founded OpenAI before leaving in 2017 to join Tesla, where he led the Full Self-Driving and Autopilot programs until 2022. He subsequently returned to OpenAI for one year before departing in 2024 to establish Eureka Labs, a startup centered on artificial intelligence in education. He also teaches an online course titled Neural Networks: Zero to Hero and publishes lectures on large language models and AI on YouTube. Karpathy stated he remains involved in education and plans to resume that work in the future.
Additional Hiring
Anthropic also hired Chris Rohlf for its frontier red team, which conducts stress testing of AI models against severe threats. Rohlf has over 20 years of experience in cybersecurity, previously working at Yahoo and Meta, and served as a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.