Anthropic simply landed one of many largest names in AI.
Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI founding member who was previously Tesla’s director of AI, introduced on Tuesday that he had joined Anthropic.
Karpathy famously coined the time period “vibe coding” and is prolific within the AI group, steadily publishing prolonged social media posts in regards to the state of the business which can be extensively learn.
“Private replace: I’ve joined Anthropic. I feel the following few years on the frontier of LLMs will likely be particularly formative,” Karpathy wrote on X. “I’m very excited to affix the crew right here and get again to R&D. I stay deeply enthusiastic about schooling and plan to renew my work on it in time.”
Anthropic stated Karpathy will work on the AI startup’s pretraining crew, which is chargeable for large-scale testing of Claude. Karpathy began this week and sits on the crew led by Nicholas Joseph, one other ex-OpenAIer who was an early worker at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival within the AI race.
“I am unable to consider anybody higher suited to do it — wanting ahead to what we construct collectively!!” Joseph wrote on X.
Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining crew! He’ll be constructing a crew centered on utilizing Claude to speed up pretraining analysis itself. I can’t consider anybody higher suited to do it — wanting ahead to what we construct collectively! https://t.co/mQb33SNiSW
— Nicholas Joseph (@nickevanjoseph) May 19, 2026
Karpathy helped launch OpenAI as a founding analysis scientist earlier than leaving for a stint at Tesla as its AI director, main the Tesla Autopilot laptop imaginative and prescient crew, earlier than rejoining OpenAI in 2023. He publicly supported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman throughout his transient ouster, however finally left OpenAI once more in February 2024 and later began Eureka Labs, an AI-centered schooling firm.
Curiosity in Anthropic has skyrocketed in 2026, due to main developments within the firm’s Claude Code and Cowork instruments and a lift in broader public curiosity following a tussle with the Trump administration.
On the identical time, Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAI has reached a fever pitch. Altman just lately accused Anthropic of serving to to gasoline the hate towards him that led to an assault on his home.