Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team
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- Andrej Karpathy is joining Anthropic, starting this week on the pre-training team responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities.
- Karpathy will help launch a new team at Anthropic focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research, telling followers on X: "I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative."
- Before joining Anthropic, Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI and later served as Tesla's director of AI, where he led the computer vision team behind Autopilot, leaving the company in 2022.
- Karpathy coined the term "vibe coding" and recently described himself as being in a "state of AI psychosis" since December, embracing "tokenmaxxing" and aggressively stress-testing frontier models.
- Since leaving Tesla, Karpathy has built a massive following as one of AI's most influential public educators on YouTube and X, though he said he plans to return to education work "in time."
Why it matters: This is a major talent coup for Anthropic, pulling a co-founder of OpenAI — its primary rival — onto the team that builds Claude's core capabilities. The hire reflects how the AI race is now fought as fiercely over elite researchers as over compute or funding rounds, with Karpathy bringing rare credibility spanning research, industry, and education.
