By Kashmira Konduparty
OpenAI co-founder and AI researcher Andrej Karpathy announced that he is joining Anthropic, the AI safety and research company considered to be a direct competitor to OpenAI, via a post on X.
“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 wrote. “I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time,” he added.
Anthropic has been hiring high profiles in the field of AI and is set to surpass OpenAI’s private market valuation in the increasing battle with its main AI rival. A founding member of xAI and an ex-Tesla employee, Ross Nordeen announced his joining at Anthropic earlier this month, when SpaceX struck a deal with xAI to rent compute capacity at their Colossus 1 data center.
READ: Anthropic CEO says AI will exceed cognitive capabilities of most humans (February 19, 2026)
Karpathy was the co-founder of OpenAI and after its kick off, he left and joined Telsa to work as the director of AI in 2017, where he led the computer vision team for Tesla Autopilot. His work at OpenAI and Tesla was used repeatedly in the Elon Musk v. OpenAI trial with Sam Altman, which concluded on Monday.
Musk described Karpathy as “arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision,” after Ilya Sutskever, who was another co-founder of OpenAI. Musk hired Karpathy for Tesla when he was the board member at both the tech companies.
READ: Ex-Thinking Machines co-founder Andrew Tulloch moves to Meta (October 13, 2025)
Karpathy left Tesla in 2022 after which he briefly went back to OpenAI and then started his AI education startup Eureka Labs, where he worked until he joined Anthropic.
Karpathy’s move to Anthropic comes at a time when competition among leading AI companies is intensifying, with firms racing to attract top researchers and shape the future of advanced AI systems.
His return to frontier AI research, combined with his background at OpenAI and Tesla, is likely to further strengthen Anthropic’s position as it expands its influence in the rapidly evolving artificial intelligence industry.