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AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, known for his work at Tesla and OpenAI, has joined Anthropic. This move has added another milestone to a career that has influenced AI development, autonomous driving, and machine learning education worldwide. Since leaving Tesla in 2022, Karpathy has become one of AI's most influential public educators, building a massive following through technical explainers and educational content on YouTube and X.
Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, will focus more on LLM advancements at Anthropic.
“I’ve joined Anthropic,” Karpathy posted on X Tuesday (May 19, 2026). “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D,” he added.
Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. It’s also one of the most expensive, compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model.
Few people have shaped modern artificial intelligence across as many dimensions as Andrej Karpathy, as a researcher, engineer, and teacher.
Over the past decade, he has been at the forefront of some of the field's most important inflexion points, and his fingerprints are on everything from self-driving cars to the tutorials that taught thousands of engineers how transformers actually work.
Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. 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.
Anthropic has also brought on Chris Rohlf to its frontier red team, which stress-tests advanced AI models against severe threats. Rohlf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience.
