Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic’s Pre Training Team

May 20, 2026
Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former Tesla AI lead, has joined Anthropic to work on pre-training for its Claude models. He will lead a new team focused on using Claude to accelerate research on large-scale training.

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, has joined Anthropic to work on pre training for its Claude models. Karpathy shared the news on X, saying he is excited to return to research and development.

Karpathy began this week as part of Anthropic’s pre training team, which handles the large scale training runs that give Claude AI its core knowledge. The company said he will form a new group focused on using Claude to accelerate pre training research.

Before joining Anthropic, Karpathy co-founded OpenAI, led Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self Driving programs, and later returned to OpenAI for a year. He also founded Eureka Labs, an education startup, and teaches an online course on neural networks.

Anthropic has also added cybersecurity expert Chris Rohlf to its frontier red team, which tests advanced AI systems against security threats.

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