Andrej Karpathy, cofounder and member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, announced that he joined rival artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic.
This marks a major AI talent shakeup among Silicon Valley’s leaders.
Writing on X (formerly known as Twitter), Karpathy wrote: “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here (Anthropic) and get back to R&D.”
Anthropic also confirmed Karpathy’s joining, stating that he will start working this week and build a team focused on using Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI model, to accelerate pertinent research.
This development comes at a time when Anthropic is expected to hit a valuation of $1 trillion and keep gaining on its main competitor, OpenAI. Just last month, Anthropic recruited Ross Nordeen, one of the co-founders of Elon Musk’s xAI.
Karpathy has a phenomenal academic and professional history. Karpathy was one of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2015.
Two years later, Elon Musk hired him to head the Autopilot vision team at Tesla.
According to emails uncovered in a recent court case, Musk considered Karpathy “arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision” after Ilya Sutskever.
At Tesla, Karpathy stayed for five years as director of AI and contributed to building the computer vision systems that power the company’s self-driving technologies.
In 2022, he left Tesla and briefly returned to OpenAI in 2023, and then departed again in 2024 to dedicatedly work on his own AI education company, Eureka Labs.
Aside from his employment background, Karpathy is known for influencing the way the world teaches AI.
He developed and taught CS231n, the first deep learning class with a focus on computer vision, at Stanford. The course went from having 150 to 750 students within two years.
He came up with the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, which refers to using AI tools to develop programs through prompts without knowing how to code. It became the Word of the Year according to Collins Dictionary.
Karpathy earned a PhD from Stanford, mentored by Fei-Fei Li, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto. Before any of those achievements, he got recognised for publishing Rubik’s Cube tutorials on YouTube under the name “badmephisto.”
