Anthropic just made a major hire: Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former director of artificial intelligence and Autopilot Vision at Tesla, has joined the company. Karpathy announced the move on X, writing, "I've joined Anthropic. 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. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time."
Karpathy started this week in Anthropic's pre-training group, working under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is the stage where massive training jobs build Claude's baseline knowledge and abilities—it's also one of the most compute-heavy and costly parts of developing top-tier models. According to TechCrunch, Karpathy is expected to create a new team that uses Claude itself to speed up research tied to pre-training.
Karpathy's career is a who's-who of AI. He began at OpenAI working on deep learning and computer vision, then left in 2017 to join Tesla, where he ran Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) efforts until 2022. He returned to OpenAI for about a year, then exited in 2024 to launch Eureka Labs, an education-focused startup. He hasn't shared many details about Eureka Labs since, and it's unclear if he'll stay involved.
Anthropic also hired cybersecurity veteran Chris Rohlf for its frontier red team, which probes advanced models for high-severity risks. Rohlf previously worked at Yahoo's security unit "The Paranoids" and spent six years at Meta. He's also been affiliated with Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, contributing to the CyberAI project. On X, he wrote, "The speed of AI progress is astounding. We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cybersecurity with AI. I can't think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment in time."
Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI to use all the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. That gives Anthropic more than 300 megawatts of additional capacity—over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs—to deploy within the month, boosting limits for Claude Code and the Claude API. Anthropic also acquired developer tools company Stainless to "improve developer experience and the connections between agents and external systems."
