Andrej Karpathy, co-founder and member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, announced that he is joining rival AI firm Anthropic.
This marks a major shakeup of AI talent among Silicon Valley executives.
Writing on X (formerly known as Twitter), Karpathy wrote: “I think the next few years on the frontier of LLMs will be particularly formative. I’m very excited to join the team here (Anthropic) and return to R&D.”
Anthropic also confirmed Karpathy’s joining, saying he will begin work this week building a team focused on using Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI model, to accelerate relevant research.
This development comes at a time when Anthropic is expected to reach a valuation of $1 trillion and continue to gain on its main competitor, OpenAI. Last month, Anthropic recruited Ross Nordeen, one of the co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI.
Karpathy has a phenomenal academic and professional track record. Karpathy was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015.
Two years later, Elon Musk hired him to lead the Autopilot vision team at Tesla.
According to emails disclosed in a recent lawsuit, Musk considered Karpathy “probably the number 2 in the world in computer vision” after Ilya Sutskever.
At Tesla, Karpathy stayed for five years as director of artificial intelligence and helped build the computer vision systems that power the company’s self-driving technologies.
In 2022, he left Tesla and briefly returned to OpenAI in 2023, then left again in 2024 to work dedicatedly at his own AI training company, Eureka Labs.
Aside from his employment background, Karpathy is known for influencing the way the world teaches AI.
He developed and taught CS231n, the first deep learning class focused on computer vision, at Stanford. The course went from having 150 to 750 students within two years.
He coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, which refers to using AI tools to develop programs through prompts without knowing how to code. It became the word of the year according to the Collins Dictionary.
Karpathy received a Ph.D. from Stanford, mentored by Fei-Fei Li, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto. Before any of these accomplishments, he was recognized for posting Rubik’s Cube tutorials on YouTube under the name “badmephisto.”
