Andrei Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, joins the pre-training team at Anthropic

Andrei Karpathy, an AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI and previously worked at OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic.

“I’ve joined Anthropic,” Karpathy posted on Tuesday

Karpathy started this week at Anthropic, where he is working on pre-season training under team captain Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the extensive training processes that give Claude his core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. It is also one of the most expensive computational stages of building a parametric model.

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 broad coaching practice. Tapping into building such a team is a clear sign from Anthropic that it believes AI-assisted research, not pure computing, is how it stays 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 Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot programs at Tesla 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 applying AI assistants to education.

Karpathy hasn’t shared many updates on Eureka Labs since its launch, and it’s unclear if the popular researcher will continue with the startup. He also teaches an online course called Neural Networks: From Zero to Hero which helps students learn to build neural networks from scratch using code, and has a YouTube channel where he semi-regularly posts lectures on MBA and AI.

“I remain very passionate about education and plan to resume my work in it in due course,” Karpathy said.

TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment.

Separately, Anthropic has also brought Chris Rolfe onto its Red Frontier team, which tests advanced AI models against extreme threats. Rolf is a cybersecurity veteran with over 20 years of experience. He previously worked on Yahoo’s highly respected cybersecurity team known as “The Paranoids,” and most recently at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rolf was also a fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, where he worked on the CyberAI project.

“We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cybersecurity using AI. I can’t think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment in time,” Rolfe said in a post on X.