Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic.
“I’ve joined Anthropic,” Karpathy posted on X. “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. It’s also one of the most expensive, compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model.
An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.
Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. Tapping him to build such a team shows that Anthropic believes AI-assisted research, rather than pure compute, is how it stays competitive with OpenAI and Google.
While at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he left in 2017 to join Tesla, where he led the Full Self-Driving and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022. He then returned to OpenAI for a year before leaving in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, focusing on applying AI assistants to education.
Karpathy hasn’t shared many updates on Eureka Labs, and it’s unclear if he will continue with the startup. He also taught an online course, “Neural Networks: Zero to Hero,” and has a YouTube channel where he posts lectures on LLMs and AI.
“I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time,” Karpathy said.
TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment.
In addition, Anthropic has hired Chris Rohlf for its frontier red team, which tests advanced AI models against threats. Rohlf, a cybersecurity veteran, worked at Yahoo’s “The Paranoids” team and at Meta. He was also a fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
“We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cybersecurity with AI,” Rohlf posted on X. “I can’t think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment.”