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 marks a major shakeup of AI talent among Silicon Valley leaders.
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Anthropic also confirmed the addition of Karpathy, saying he will begin work this week and form 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 ground 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 career. 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 in a recent court case, Musk considered Karpathy “possibly the second man in the world in computer vision” after Ilya Sutskever.
At Tesla, Karpathy spent five years as chief AI officer, helping to 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.
Apart from his work experience, Karpathy is known for influencing the way the world teaches AI.
He developed and taught CS231n, the first deep learning class focused on computer vision, at Stanford. The course went from having 150 to 750 students in two years.
He came up with the term “vibe coding” in February 2025, which refers to the use of artificial intelligence tools to develop programs through prompts without knowing how to code. It became the word of the year according to the Collins Dictionary.
Karpathy earned a PhD from Stanford, mentored by Fei-Fei Li, a master’s degree from the University of British Columbia, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Toronto. Before any of those accomplishments, he was recognized for posting Rubik’s Cube tutorials on YouTube under the name “badmephisto.”
