The latest barb in the intensifying rivalry between OpenAI and Anthropic: Dario Amodei’s hiring of Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of Tesla’s self-driving unit. Karpathy has joined Anthropic’s pretraining team, he announced on X yesterday (May 19). “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” he wrote. “I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D.”
Karpathy’s move is a significant win for Anthropic, which has been working to narrow the gap with OpenAI. A Slovakian-born Canadian researcher who studied A.I. under leading academics such as Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, Karpathy contributed to the development of OpenAI’s early GPT models before leaving in 2017 to lead Tesla’s Autopilot efforts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has lauded Karpathy as “arguably the #2 guy in computer vision” behind Ilya Sutskever, another founding member of OpenAI, according to documents unveiled in Musk’s recent lawsuit against OpenAI. “The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done,” Musk wrote of Tesla’s hiring of Karpathy in a 2017 email.
After five years at Tesla, Karpathy returned to OpenAI, then departed again in 2024 to launch Eureka Labs, an A.I. education startup. “I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time,” said Karpathy in his recent X post.
Beyond his formal roles, Karpathy has built a large following through educational content on YouTube, where he has more than 1.4 million subscribers, and he has also invested in startups. He is also credited with coining “vibe coding,” a term now widely used for A.I.-assisted software development.
He is not the only OpenAI figure to join Anthropic. The company has also recruited Jan Leike, who co-led OpenAI’s superalignment team before leaving in 2024 over safety disagreements. Another OpenAI co-founder, John Schulman, briefly joined Anthropic after stepping away from alignment work at OpenAI in 2024, before later moving to Thinking Machines Lab, a startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.
Anthropic has also added other high-profile talent in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Ross Nordeen, a founding member of Elon Musk’s A.I. startup xAI, joined Anthropic’s compute team.
While OpenAI remains a leading force in the A.I. race, Anthropic is gaining momentum. The startup is reportedly in talks for a $30 billion funding round that could value it at $900 billion, surpassing OpenAI’s $852 billion valuation. Its revenue run rate also topped $30 billion last month, compared with OpenAI’s reported $24 billion annualized revenue in March, though the figures are not directly comparable because OpenAI’s do not include cloud partner sales.
At Anthropic, Karpathy will work within the pretraining unit, which is responsible for the large-scale training that underpins Claude’s core capabilities. He will report to Nick Joseph, Anthropic’s head of pretraining, who said in a recent X post that Karpathy will build “a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself.” His arrival underscores Anthropic’s broader push to compete more aggressively on both talent and technology.
