OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla AI leader Andrej Karpathy has announced that he is joining Anthropic, marking a high-profile addition to one of OpenAI’s biggest rivals in the artificial intelligence race.
In a post on X, Karpathy confirmed the move, writing: “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. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.”
Who is Andrej Karpathy?
is currently among the most influential figures in artificial intelligence and is widely credited with helping popularise the term ‘vibe coding’.
The 39-year-old AI researcher was among the founding members of OpenAI alongside Sam Altman, , Ilya Sutskever and. Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI between 2016 and 2017 and helped shape the company’s early structure and recruiting efforts while contributing to research in deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning.
Following his stint at OpenAI, Karpathy joined Tesla in 2017 and later became Senior Director of AI at the company. As per his LinkedIn profile, Karpathy led the computer vision team behind Tesla Autopilot, overseeing data collection systems, neural network training, and deployment for the company’s self-driving efforts.
During his five-year tenure, Karpathy became one of the most recognisable figures in AI research and autonomous driving.
Before OpenAI and Tesla, Karpathy completed his PhD at Stanford University, where he worked on neural networks and computer vision research under the mentorship of Fei-Fei Li, widely recognised as the ‘Godmother of AI’.
After leaving Tesla, Karpathy returned to OpenAI for a second stint that ran from February 2023 to February 2024. Following his departure, he clarified on X that there was no controversy behind the decision.
“Nothing ‘happened’ and it’s not a result of any particular event, issue or drama.”
Karpathy said he planned to focus on personal projects after leaving OpenAI. Now, a little over two years later, he is returning to frontier AI research, this time at .
After leaving OpenAI, Karpathy launched Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup that he described as an “AI native” school. At the time, Karpathy said the idea behind Eureka Labs was to combine high-quality teaching with AI assistants that could act as scalable tutors.
Karpathy has also become a widely followed educator in the AI community and created a course called ‘Neural Networks: Zero to Hero’. He also regularly publishes long-form explainer videos focused on large language models, vibe coding, and AI tool demonstrations.