Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic's Pre-Training Team — Biggest Talent Shift Since OpenAI Departures

TechCrunch / CNBC·high signal

OpenAI co-founder and former Tesla Autopilot lead Andrej Karpathy announced May 19 that he has joined Anthropic, where he will start a team using Claude to accelerate pre-training research under team lead Nick Joseph. Karpathy stated he believes 'the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,' and an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed the hire to TechCrunch. This is arguably the highest-profile AI talent move of 2026 — a co-founder of OpenAI choosing Anthropic signals a significant gravitational shift in the frontier lab landscape.