Andrej Karpathy, an AI educator and one of the founding members of OpenAI, has officially joined Anthropic, the executive announced on Tuesday, May 19, as the company accelerates its hiring in response to escalating competition in the generative artificial intelligence sector.
“Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic,” Karpathy shared in a post on X on May 19. “The coming years at the forefront of LLMs will be particularly influential. I am thrilled to be part of the team here and return to R&D.”
Karpathy mentioned that he remains “deeply passionate about education” and intends to return to that field in the future.
Anthropic, the organization behind the Claude chatbot, has been swiftly growing its research and engineering teams as companies strive to develop more advanced large language models and AI agents.
Founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei, Anthropic has quickly emerged as a key competitor to OpenAI and Google in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.
Karpathy is well-regarded in the AI field for his contributions to deep learning and computer vision. As Tesla’s AI director, he previously led the computer vision team for the autopilot division, handling aspects such as data collection, neural network training, and the rollout of AI systems supporting driver-assistance features and full self-driving technology.
Prior to his time at Tesla, Karpathy worked as a research scientist at OpenAI from January 2016 to June 2017, during the formative years of the company before the public release of ChatGPT.
After leaving Tesla in 2022, Karpathy focused on AI education initiatives and online teaching content, becoming a prominent voice on advancements in generative AI and machine learning. He boasts 1.4 million YouTube subscribers.
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First Published: May 20, 2026 7:26 AM IST
