Andrej Karpathy Moves to Anthropic to Lead LLM Research

Andrej Karpathy, the computer scientist who co-founded OpenAI and served as Tesla's director of AI, has joined Anthropic, the safety-focused company behind the Claude family of large language models.

Karpathy called the coming years at the frontier of LLMs “especially formative” and said he is eager to return to R&D. He noted his commitment to education but said that work will resume later.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei. The San Francisco firm focuses on AI safety and alignment. By 2025, it had become one of the most capitalized private AI companies in the world. Its Claude models compete directly with OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini.

Karpathy also coined the term “vibe coding” earlier in 2025, describing a workflow where developers specify intent in natural language and AI agents generate most of the code. The term has been widely adopted in the AI-assisted development community.

This hire strengthens Anthropic’s research bench as competition with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta AI, and xAI intensifies.