Andrei Karpathy AI Tesla Director and keynote speaker at the Train AI conference at Pier 27 in San Francisco, California. on Thursday. May 10, 2018.
Michael McCaw | San Francisco Chronicle | Getty Images
Andrei Karpathy, artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of OpenAI before being poached teslaannounced its participation in Anthropic on Tuesday.
“I think the next few years on the LLM front will be particularly formative,” Karpathy said in a post about X, referring to large-scale language models. “I’m very excited to join the team here and get back to research and development.”
Starting this week, Karpathy plans to build a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training studies that help the company’s models gain core knowledge and functionality, Anthropic said.
This is the latest high-profile hire for Anthropic, which is on track to outperform OpenAI’s private market valuation and is in an intensifying war for talent with its biggest AI rival. xAI founding member and former Tesla employee Ross Nordean announced he was joining Anthropic earlier this month, the same day the company signed a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to rent computing power from xAI’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
After helping launch OpenAI, Karpathy tesla In 2017, he became the director of AI. There he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot.
Musk hired Karpathy from OpenAI while the Tesla CEO served on the boards of both technology companies. Mr. Karpathy’s work at OpenAI and Tesla was repeatedly brought up in the Musk v. Altman case, which concluded on Monday with a jury and judge ruling in favor of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
In an email exchange displayed as an exhibit during the proceedings, Musk said Karpathy was “probably the second-best guy in the world in computer vision,” after Ilya Sutskeva, another OpenAI co-founder.
“The OpenAI guys would be trying to kill me, but it had to be done…” Musk wrote about Karpathy’s hiring.
Karpathy was one of several OpenAI employees Musk borrowed from OpenAI to work for free for several months at Tesla, where self-driving car development was not progressing as quickly as promised. Mr. Karpathy retired from Tesla in 2022, but the company still does not sell vehicles that can be safely operated without a human driver at the wheel and brakes at all times.
After leaving Tesla, Karpathy briefly returned to OpenAI before starting AI education startup Eureka Labs, where he remains to this day. Karpathy holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.
Watch: 2026 CNBC Disruptor 50: Watch the full interview with Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei
