Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy to build next-generation Claude AI models
OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI leader Andrej Karpathy has announced that he will join Anthropic, a high-profile addition to one of OpenAI’s biggest rivals in the AI race.
Karpathy confirmed the move in a post on
Who is Andrej Karpathy?
Karpathy is currently among the most influential names in the field of artificial intelligence and is widely credited with helping popularize the term ‘jitter coding’.
The 39-year-old artificial intelligence researcher was among the founding members of OpenAI, along with Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Elon Musk. Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI from 2016 to 2017, helping shape the company’s early structure and recruiting efforts while contributing to deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning research.
Following his tenure at OpenAI, Karpathy joined Tesla in 2017 and later became Senior Director of Artificial Intelligence at the company. Karpathy led the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot, overseeing data acquisition systems, neural network training and deployment for the company’s self-driving efforts, according to his LinkedIn profile.
During his five-year tenure, Karpathy has become one of the most recognized names in artificial intelligence research and autonomous driving.
Before OpenAI and Tesla, Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford University; here he worked on neural networks and computer vision research under the mentorship of Fei-Fei Li, widely known as the “Godmother of Artificial Intelligence.”
After leaving Tesla, Karpathy returned to OpenAI for a second term from February 2023 to February 2024. Following his departure, he explained to X that there was no discussion behind the decision.
“Nothing ‘happened’ and this is not the result of any event, issue or drama.”
Karpathy said he plans to focus on personal projects after leaving OpenAI. Now, a little more than two years later, he’s returning to AI research, this time at Anthropic.
After leaving OpenAI, Karpathy founded Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup that he describes 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 instructors.
Karpathy has also become a widely followed educator in the AI community and has created a course called ‘Neural Networks: From Zero to Hero’. He also regularly posts long-form explainer videos focusing on large language models, vibrational coding, and AI tool demonstrations.
