Andrej Karpathy, co-founder and member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, announced that he has joined rival artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic.
This is a major shake-up of AI talent among Silicon Valley executives.
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Anthropic also confirmed Karpathy’s arrival, saying he will begin work this week and build a team focused on using Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI model, to accelerate relevant research.
This development comes at a time when Anthropic is expected to reach a $1 trillion valuation and continue to gain on its main competitor, OpenAI. 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 lead the Autopilot vision team at Tesla.
According to emails uncovered during a recent trial, Musk considered Karpathy “arguably the number two player in the world in computer vision” after Ilya Sutskever.
At Tesla, Karpathy stayed for five years as director of AI and helped build the computer vision systems that power the company’s self-driving technologies.
In 2022, he left Tesla and briefly returned to OpenAI in 2023, then left again in 2024 to work dedicatedly on his own AI education company, Eureka Labs.
In addition to his professional experience, Karpathy is known for influencing the way the world teaches AI.
He developed and taught CS231n, the first deep learning course focused on computer vision, at Stanford. The course grew from 150 to 750 students in two years.
He coined the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, which refers to using AI tools to develop programs via prompts without knowing how to code. It became the word of the year according to the Collins dictionary.
Karpathy earned a doctorate from Stanford, supervised by Fei-Fei Li, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto. Prior to any of these achievements, he was recognized for posting Rubik’s Cube tutorials on YouTube under the name “badmephisto”.
