Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who founded and previously worked at OpenAI and led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic.
“I joined Anthropic,” Karpathy told X on Tuesday. “I think the next few years at the LLMs frontier will be very constructive. I’m very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-training under team leader Nick Joseph. Early training is responsible for major training activities that provide Claude with basic knowledge and skills, according to the company. It is also one of the most expensive, computationally intensive stages of boundary modeling.
An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research.
Karpathy is one of the few researchers who can bridge the gap between LLM theory and large-scale training practice. Tapping him to form such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI-assisted research, rather than pure computing, is how it remains competitive with OpenAI and Google.
While at OpenAI, Karpathy focused on deep learning and computer vision until he left in 2017 to join Tesla. He led Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022.
He then returned to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to using AI assistants in education.
Karpathy hasn’t had many updates on Eureka Labs since its launch, and it’s unclear if the well-known researcher will continue with the startup. He also teaches an online course called Neural Networks: Zero to Hero that helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch in code, and has a YouTube channel where he posts lectures on LLMs and AI.
“I still love education and I plan to continue my work in it in time,” said Karpathy.
TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment.
Separately, Anthropic also brought Chris Rohlf to its red border team, which stress-tests advanced AI models against complex threats. Rohlf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with over 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo’s highly regarded cybersecurity team known as “The Paranoids,” and most recently at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rohlf is also a fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where he works on the CyberAI project.
“We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cybersecurity with AI,” Rohlf said in a post on X. “I can’t think of a better company or team to join at this critical time.”
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