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May 19, 2026 • Rebecca Bellan, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai

Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team

Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team

OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team

Overview

Andrej Karpathy, the renowned AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, has officially joined Anthropic. The move signals a significant shift in the competitive landscape of frontier AI model development.

Key Details

Karpathy's New Role

  • Position: Working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph
  • Focus: Building a team that uses Claude to accelerate pre-training research
  • Significance: Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities—one of the most expensive, compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model

Background

Career Timeline:

  • Co-founded OpenAI, focusing on deep learning and computer vision
  • Left OpenAI in 2017 to join Tesla
  • Led Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs
  • Returned to OpenAI in 2022
  • Left again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup applying AI assistants to education
  • Now joining Anthropic in 2026

Strategic Implications

"Tapping him to build such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI-assisted research, rather than pure compute, is how it stays competitive with OpenAI and Google."

Karpathy is described as "one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice."

Additional Anthropic Hiring

Chris Rohlf has also joined Anthropic's frontier red team:

  • Background: 20+ years in cybersecurity
  • Previous roles: Yahoo's "The Paranoids" team, Meta (6 years)
  • New role: Stress-testing advanced AI models against severe threats
  • Quote: "We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cyber security with AI."

Karpathy's Educational Work

  • Created "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero" online course
  • Maintains an active YouTube channel with lectures on LLMs and AI
  • Plans to resume educational work: "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time."