Anthropic Hires Andrej Karpathy for Claude Pretraining Team
The former OpenAI founding member and Tesla AI executive will work on the large-scale training systems behind Anthropic’s Claude models.
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Anthropic has hired Andrej Karpathy, one of OpenAI’s founding members and a former Tesla AI executive, adding a high-profile researcher to its pretraining team as competition for AI talent intensifies.
“I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy said in a post on X, adding that he is “excited to get back to R&D.”
Anthropic said Karpathy has joined the pretraining team led by Nick Joseph, which runs the large-scale training work that gives Claude its core knowledge and capabilities.
Axios reported that Karpathy will also help launch a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research.
The hire gives Anthropic one of the industry’s best-known AI researchers.
Karpathy was an early OpenAI staffer before joining Tesla, where he worked on the company’s self-driving and AI technology and later led computer vision work for Autopilot.
Karpathy left Tesla in 2022 and later founded Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education venture.
He said he remains “deeply passionate about education” and plans to return to that work in time.
The appointment comes as Anthropic competes with OpenAI and other frontier-model developers to build more capable AI systems, with talent becoming a key battleground alongside compute capacity, model performance and enterprise adoption.
