OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic as AI race intensifies

One of OpenAI's co-founders and Tesla's AI executive Andrej Karpathy has left the group and joined Anthropic.

As announced on Tuesday, his decision was based on strengthening the Claude maker ‌because Karpathy believes that Anthropic looks to dominate the AI race in the near future.

"I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D," he said in an X post.

Karpathy, a highly influential member of the AI community, played a key role in developing Tesla's self-driving and artificial intelligence technology before leaving the firm in 2022.

"I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time," Karpathy, who announced in 2024 that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs, said on X.

He has joined Anthropic's pretraining team, responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude ‌its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic. He started work this week and sits on the team of Nick Joseph, the company's head of pretraining.

Karpathy studied under prominent Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of its earliest staffers before moving to Tesla.

John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, left for Anthropic in 2024. The ChatGPT maker has seen a slew of executives leave the firm, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former tech chief Mira Murati, founder and CEO of AI startup Thinking Machines.

This comes as Anthropic has been grappling with strong competition from rival frontier model developers such as OpenAI as they seek to create the most sophisticated models for cloud providers.