OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic, the AI safety company announced on May 19, 2026. Karpathy will focus on core research and development at the frontier AI lab.
Karpathy to focus on core R&D
Karpathy previously worked at OpenAI, Tesla, and founded the education startup Eureka Labs. In a personal statement, he said the next few years at the frontier of large language models will be especially formative and that he is excited to get back to R&D. He also noted he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to resume that work in time.
Noam Brown, a researcher at OpenAI, commented that he would have loved for Karpathy to rejoin OpenAI but is happy he is at any frontier lab pushing the field forward. Brown added that it is easy to frame the move as zero-sum among labs, but in truth they are collectively advancing the most important technology of the era.
Anthropic has not disclosed further details about Karpathy's specific projects or timeline. The move underscores the ongoing talent movement among leading AI research organizations.
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