Anthropic has hired renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, marking one of the company’s highest-profile talent acquisitions as competition intensifies across the artificial intelligence industry.
Karpathy announced the move publicly after months of speculation about his next role. The former OpenAI co-founder and ex-Tesla AI director will reportedly work under Anthropic’s pre-training division to help accelerate scientific research related to large language model development.
Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. 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. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
— Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) May 19, 2026
Anthropic confirmed Karpathy’s mission will focus on building a new team that uses Claude to improve and automate parts of the AI research process itself. The strategy reflects growing industry interest in AI-assisted research and development as companies seek to improve model capabilities without relying solely on larger compute budgets.
Karpathy is one of the most recognizable figures in modern AI research. After completing his PhD under Fei-Fei Li at Stanford, he co-founded OpenAI in 2015 before joining Tesla to lead computer vision efforts behind Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems. He later launched Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup.
Beyond his technical work, Karpathy has become widely influential through educational content and popularization of AI concepts. He also coined the term “vibe coding” in 2025 while describing AI-assisted software development using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet model.
The hire comes as Anthropic reportedly triples annualized revenue to $30 billion and aggressively expands its talent base to compete with OpenAI, Google, and xAI. The company has recently recruited additional high-profile engineers and researchers from Tesla, Meta, and xAI as it strengthens its frontier AI capabilities.
