Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic to Lead Claude Pretraining Research

Prominent artificial intelligence researcher Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic, the company announced this week, marking a significant move in the competitive landscape of frontier AI labs. Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, will focus on pretraining research for Anthropic’s Claude models.

In a public statement, Karpathy said he believes the coming years will be a defining period for the development of large language models and that he is eager to return to hands-on research and development. He also noted he remains deeply passionate about his educational work and intends to resume it in the future.

At Anthropic, Karpathy will work within the pretraining division, which handles the computationally intensive process of building a model’s core knowledge. He is expected to establish a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research, a strategy that signals the company’s emphasis on AI-assisted research innovation.

Karpathy’s career has been closely watched in the AI industry. He was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015, left in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving computer vision teams, and rejoined...