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May 19, 2026
Analyzed by Llama- 4 Scout 17B 16E Instruct

Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team

AI Summary
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former AI lead at Tesla, has joined Anthropic's pre-training team. He will work on large-scale training runs for Anthropic's AI model, Claude. Karpathy's move signals Anthropic's focus on AI-assisted research to stay competitive with OpenAI and Google.

The Leadership Shift at Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, the AI researcher who co-founded and formerly worked at OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic. Karpathy announced his move on X, stating that he is excited to join the team and get back to R&D.

Karpathy's Role in Pre-Training

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. Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.

The Significance of Karpathy's Move

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.

Karpathy's Background

  • Co-founded OpenAI and worked on deep learning and computer vision until 2017
  • Led Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs from 2017 to 2022
  • Returned to OpenAI for one year before leaving in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to applying AI assistants to education

Anthropic's Recent Hires

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.

The Future of AI Research

Karpathy's move to Anthropic and the company's focus on AI-assisted research signal a new direction in the AI landscape. As Karpathy stated, "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."