Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic to lead pre-training research

Andrej Karpathy, an artificial intelligence researcher, has joined Anthropic to lead a new team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. Pre-training is the large-scale training phase for AI models, which is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. It represents one of the most expensive and compute-intensive phases of building a model. Karpathy announced on Tuesday on X that he has 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,” Karpathy, an AI researcher, said. At Anthropic, Karpathy is working under team lead Nick Joseph. An Anthropic spokesperson stated that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. The hire signals Anthropic’s belief that AI-assisted research is how the company stays competitive with OpenAI and Google.

Separately, Anthropic has hired Chris Rohlf to join its frontier red team, a group that stress-tests AI models against threats. The frontier red team stress-tests advanced AI models against severe threats. Rohlf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo, and later at Meta, where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rohlf was also a fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Rohlf stated on X that there is a real opportunity to dramatically improve cybersecurity with AI, adding that he cannot think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment.

Karpathy brings a history in the field, having previously worked at OpenAI and Tesla before founding his own startup, Eureka Labs. He worked at OpenAI until he departed in 2017 to join Tesla, where he led the company’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) program before leaving in 2022. He then returned to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs, a startup dedicated to applying AI assistants to education. While Karpathy has not shared many updates on Eureka Labs since its launch, he remains committed to educational efforts. Karpathy stated that he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to resume his work on it in time.

Why it matters

Anthropic is betting that AI-assisted research is the primary differentiator to keep pace with OpenAI and Google, rather than relying solely on raw compute power.