Former OpenAI and Tesla AI lead Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, announced on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic. He revealed the career move through a post on X. Beyond his work at top tech conglomerates, Karpathy is also known for coining the term “vibe coding.”

In a social media post, Karpathy said, “I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote on X. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.”

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At Anthropic, Andrej Karpathy will be working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company.

While working at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he departed in 2017 to join Tesla. He led Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022. He later returned to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to bringing AI assistance to education. Continuing his passion for education, he has also taught an online course called Neural Networks: Zero to Hero, which helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch. He also runs a YouTube channel where he posts semi-regularly on LLMs and AI.

Anthropic has also brought in Chris Rolf to its frontier red team, which stress-tests severe threats. He is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience. He previously worked on Yahoo’s well-regarded cybersecurity team known as “the Paranoids,” and more recently at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic.