Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former Tesla AI director, joined Anthropic the week of May 19, 2026, to work on pre-training research for the company's Claude large language model [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. He started under the pre-training team led by Nick Joseph, who said he was "excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He’ll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself" [5].
Karpathy will focus on creating a new group that uses Claude to automate and speed up pre-training research, emphasizing AI-assisted development over purely relying on compute power [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Anthropic’s Claude model depends on large-scale, compute-intensive pre-training runs to develop its capabilities [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. Karpathy also coined the term "vibe coding" to describe developers who generate code by guiding AI through natural language prompts [3, 4, 8, 6, 7].
Karpathy expressed excitement about returning to research and development, saying, "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 also said he plans to resume his focus on AI education over time [1]. Previously, Karpathy worked at OpenAI in 2016-2017 and 2023, led Autopilot AI and Full Self Driving at Tesla from 2017 to 2022, and founded the AI education startup Eureka Labs in 2024 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
Chris Rohlf, a cybersecurity veteran from Yahoo and Meta, also joined Anthropic’s frontier red team the same week as Karpathy to test model vulnerabilities [1, 4, 6, 7]. Anthropic is competing with other AI leaders like OpenAI, Google, and Elon Musk's xAI to attract top talent [2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. The company recently secured a $30 billion funding round at a valuation of about $900 billion as of mid-May 2026 [4].
In early May 2026, Anthropic also hired Eric Boyd from Microsoft as head of infrastructure and signed a compute deal with SpaceX [2, 4]. Karpathy’s arrival continues Anthropic’s expansion of its AI research capabilities. His first official week with the company began May 19, 2026, with ongoing efforts to build out pre-training research using Claude.
