Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team

Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla, has joined Anthropic's pre-training team. He announced the move on X on May 19, 2026, stating his excitement to return to R&D. Karpathy will work under team lead Nick Joseph, focusing on pre-training—the large-scale, compute-intensive phase that gives Claude its core knowledge. Anthropic plans for Karpathy to start a team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. This signals Anthropic's belief that AI-assisted research, not pure compute, is key to competing with OpenAI and Google. Karpathy previously left OpenAI in 2017 for Tesla, leading Full Self-Driving and Autopilot until 2022. He returned to OpenAI for a year before leaving in 2024 to found Eureka Labs, an AI education startup. Separately, Anthropic hired cybersecurity veteran Chris Rohlf for its frontier red team. Rohlf, with over 20 years of experience, previously worked at Yahoo's "The Paranoids" and Meta, and was a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.