Anthropic Hires OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy to Develop Next-Generation Claude AI Models

Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic as AI Researcher

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI leader Andrej Karpathy has announced that he is joining Anthropic, marking a high-profile addition to one of OpenAI's biggest rivals in the artificial intelligence race. Karpathy confirmed the move on X, citing his excitement to join the team and resume research and development efforts.

Karpathy is currently among the most influential figures in artificial intelligence and is widely credited with helping popularise the term 'vibe coding'. Born in 1984, Karpathy has spent nearly two decades at the forefront of AI research. His career spans multiple industries, including academia, research, and industry.

Karpathy's professional journey began with a PhD at Stanford University, where he worked on neural networks and computer vision research under the mentorship of Fei-Fei Li, widely recognised as the 'Godmother of AI'. After completing his PhD, Karpathy joined OpenAI in 2016 as a research scientist, working alongside Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, and Elon Musk. During his tenure at OpenAI, Karpathy contributed to research in deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning.

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In 2017, Karpathy joined Tesla, where he became Senior Director of AI. As per his LinkedIn profile, Karpathy led the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot, overseeing data collection systems, neural network training, and deployment for the company's self-driving efforts. Karpathy spent five years at Tesla, becoming one of the most recognisable figures in AI research and autonomous driving.

Karpathy returned to OpenAI for a second stint from February 2023 to February 2024. After leaving OpenAI, he clarified on X that there was no controversy behind the decision. Karpathy stated that he planned to focus on personal projects after leaving OpenAI, but now, a little over two years later, he is returning to frontier AI research, this time at Anthropic.

Karpathy has also pursued his passion for education, launching Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup that he described as an "AI native" school. At the time, Karpathy said the idea behind Eureka Labs was to combine high-quality teaching with AI assistants that could act as scalable tutors. Karpathy has also become a widely followed educator in the AI community, creating a course called 'Neural Networks: Zero to Hero' and regularly publishing long-form explainer videos focused on large language models, vibe coding, and AI tool demonstrations.

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