Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic Pretraining Team

Andrej Karpathy announced on Tuesday that he has joined Anthropic and started work on the pretraining team. Karpathy wrote on X that the next few years at the frontier of large language models would be especially formative. He said he was eager to get back to research.

Karpathy's career Karpathy was a founding member of OpenAI in 2015.

He later ran AI at Tesla, returned to OpenAI in 2023, and left in 2024 to start Eureka Labs.

Research contributions In February 2025, Karpathy posted about a method he called vibe coding. The phrase spread beyond the AI industry and was named Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. In March, Karpathy described an experiment he called autoresearch.

He ran an AI coding agent unsupervised for two days and reported an 11 percent reduction in training time when the same tweaks were applied to a larger model. According to Anthropic, Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research.

He will report to Nick Joseph.