OpenAI Co-Founder Andrej Karpathy moves to Anthropic

Anthropic has roped in renowned AI researcher Andrej Karpathy, who co-founded OpenAI. Widely regarded as one of the leading minds in artificial intelligence, Karpathy is also credited with popularizing the term “vibe coding,” now commonly used to describe AI-assisted programming.

Karpathy shared the news on X, stating, “Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative.” He added that his role at Anthropic will focus on AI research and development.    

Prior moving to Elon Musk’s Tesla in 2017, Andrej Karpathy co-founded OpenAI. At Tesla he headed the AI team for more than 5 years.   

In 2025, Karpathy introduced the term “vibe coding,” referring to the growing practice of using AI systems to generate software code. The phrase has since gained widespread adoption among developers working with AI coding agents.

After leaving Tesla in 2022, Karpathy briefly returned to OpenAI before launching Eureka Labs, an AI-focused education startup. He holds a PhD in computer science from Stanford University.

At Anthropic, Karpathy is expected to join the pretraining division of the company. Nicholas Joseph, who leads Claude’s pretraining team, confirmed on X that Karpathy will establish a new research group focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining research..

The initiative aims to leverage AI systems to automate and speed up critical aspects of AI model development. Anthropic has previously stated that Claude already generates around 90% of the company’s code internally.

Nicholas wrote, “Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team! He’ll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!”