OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic; To Work on Pre-Training

May 20, 2026 12:06 PM IST | Written by Mithun MK | Edited by Vaibhav Jha

Andrej Karpathy, co founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, announced on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic AI, where he will work on pre-training under team lead Nicholas Joseph. He started this week.

40-year-old Slovak-Canadian AI researcher Karpathy wrote on X that he believed “the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative” and said he was returning to R&D work.

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

Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. It is one of the most expensive and compute-intensive phases of building a frontier model. CNBC reported Anthropic as saying that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. The company did not detail the team’s size or timeline.

“Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He’ll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!” said Joseph, welcoming Karpathy on X.

Karpathy co-founded OpenAI before leaving for Tesla in 2017, where he served as director of AI and led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot. He returned to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup focused on applying AI assistants to education. Eureka Labs remains active alongside his new role at Anthropic.

Karpathy did not address the startup’s status in his announcement post but said he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to resume his work at a later time.

The hire comes as Anthropic is poised to surpass OpenAI’s private market valuation and is in an intensifying battle for talent with its chief AI rival. Ross Nordeen, a founding member of xAI and former Tesla employee, also joined Anthropic earlier this month. Karpathy’s name came up repeatedly during the Musk vs Altman trial, which concluded on Monday with a ruling in OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s favor.

Also Read: Anthropic Appoints Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to Board of Directors

Authors

Mithun MK

Mithun MK is a Special Correspondent at AI FrontPage. He brings over six years of investigative reporting on technology, surveillance, digital rights, and governance at The News Minute and The New Indian Express. He is trained in cross-border investigative methods with OCCRP, alongside reporters from Southeast Asia, and brings both reporting depth and technical fluency to AI FrontPage's coverage of the global AI industry.

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Vaibhav Jha

Vaibhav Jha is an Editor and Co-founder of AI FrontPage. In his decade long career in journalism, Vaibhav has reported for publications including The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, and The New York Times, covering the intersection of technology, policy, and society. Outside work, he’s usually trying to persuade people to watch Anurag Kashyap films.

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