SAN FRANCISCO: High-profile artificial intelligence researcher and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined Amazon and Google-backed AI safety startup Anthropic. Karpathy announced the move via his X (formerly Twitter) account, expressing enthusiasm about returning to core research and development.
Describing the upcoming years at the frontier of large language models (LLMs) as “formative,” Karpathy stated he is “very excited to join the team” at Anthropic.
A Stellar AI Career
Karpathy’s move is one of the most significant high-level technical talent shifts in the AI industry, given his foundational role across major deep-tech ecosystems:
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OpenAI (2015–2017 & 2023–2024): He was one of the original founding members and a primary research scientist at OpenAI during its inception. After a stint away, he briefly returned in 2023 before departing again in early 2024.
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Tesla (2017–2022): Karpathy served as the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Tesla, where he spearheaded the computer vision and deep learning architectures for the automaker’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) engineering teams.
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Eureka Labs (2024–Present): In July 2024, he founded Eureka Labs, an AI-native education venture aimed at building a new kind of teacher-AI assistant ecosystem.
Strategic Industry Play
Karpathy’s transition to Anthropic—the creators of the Claude LLM family—solidifies the company’s research muscle as it continues to compete head-to-head with OpenAI and Google in building next-generation frontier models.
