Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist and AI researcher best known as the co-founder of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla, announced today that he has joined Anthropic, the AI safety-focused company behind the Claude family of large language models.
Karpathy described the coming years at the frontier of LLMs as “especially formative” and said he was eager to return to research and development.
“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,” Karpathy said in his announcement. He also noted that he remains committed to education and intends to resume that work in the future.
Karpathy previously served as senior director of AI at Tesla, where he led the Autopilot computer vision team, and before that held a research role at OpenAI during its early years.
After leaving Tesla in 2022, he worked independently, producing widely followed educational content on neural networks and deep learning. That period made him one of the most recognized figures in AI without a corporate affiliation.
