Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former Tesla AI lead, has joined Anthropic.
Karpathy announced the move on X on May 19, 2026, and began work that week on Anthropic’s pre-training team.
Announcement
In his post, Karpathy wrote:
“Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. 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 had most recently been running his education startup, Eureka Labs.
Why It Matters
This is one of the highest-profile researcher moves in the AI industry this year. Karpathy is widely known for his research, clear explanations of how large language models work, and popular educational content.
His addition to Anthropic’s pre-training efforts comes as frontier labs continue to compete aggressively on both model capabilities and the infrastructure needed to train them at scale.