Karpathy remains committed to education and will resume it later
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Many users celebrated Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic for frontier LLM research as an exciting boost to Claude development and the field, while some voiced disappointment or harsh criticism of the move.
How does this move differ from Karpathy’s previous roles at OpenAI and Tesla, if at all?
Karpathy’s move to Anthropic centers on hands-on frontier LLM R&D after founding the education startup Eureka Labs in 2024, unlike his Tesla role directing Autopilot computer vision (2017–2022) or OpenAI stints on deep learning, midtraining, and synthetic data (2015–2017 and 2023–2024). ¹
He now calls the next few years at the LLM frontier especially formative while planning to resume education work later.
What specific innovations has Karpathy created in the realm of AI, and how might he help Anthropic here?
Karpathy led Tesla's Autopilot computer vision team, scaling neural nets with data-centric AI and custom chip deployment for real-world autonomy, and built OpenAI teams on midtraining plus synthetic data. ¹² At Anthropic his frontier LLM R&D experience could speed synthetic data pipelines and large-scale training for next-gen models.
karpathy pulling up to the office for his first day on the research team
SITUATION DETECTED: Andrej @Karpathy has joined Anthropic.
Breaking: Andrej Karpathy just filed his Q1 2026 13F.
Here's everything you need to know about his recent 13F Top 10 positions:
1. VanEck Semiconductor ETF - $SMH - [Put] — $2.04B 2. Nvidia - $NVDA - [Put] — $1.57B 3. Oracle - $ORCL - [Put] — $1.07B 4. Broadcom - $AVGO - [Put] — $1.01B 5. Advanced Micro Devices - $AMD - [Put] — $969M 6. Bloom Energy - $BE — $879M 7. SanDisk - $SNDK — $724M 8. Micron - $MU - [Put] — $584M 9. CoreWeave - $CRWV — $556M 10. Taiwan Semiconductor - $TSM - [Put] — $535M
New positions: • $SMH, $NVDA, $ORCL, $AVGO, $AMD, $MU, $TSM, $ASML, $INTC, $GLW — all puts • $MU [Call] — $422M • $TSM [Call] — $355M • $SNDK [Call] — $389M
Summary: He kept his AI infrastructure longs and opened $8.45B in new puts against tech and semiconductor
BREAKING: after just 4 hours at Anthropic @karpathy will be stepping away to join the A16Z new media team.
"I think the next few years at the frontier of attention and growth hacking will be especially formative"
What
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Karpathy will be forming a new pre-training team focused on Recursive Self Improvement and will be teaching Claude to improve Claude's training, reporting from Axios.
To know what Chinese labs are doing you can just read their papers.
To know what American labs are doing you have to wait for @karpathy to do a 1 year internship and then post a GitHub repo with what he learned.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
@karpathy Welcome!! So excited we get to work together 👋
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
OH: “This is like LeBron James joining Michael Jordan and the Bulls.”
Every other Frontier Lab: “Shit…”
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Andrej Karpathy just joined Anthropic.
His new boss is the man who realised AI could train itself.
You've probably never heard of him.
Meet Nick Joseph 🇺🇸
> Harvard grad. No PhD. No fame. > First job: ranking charities at a nonprofit called GiveWell. > That's where he first heard the words "AI safety." > He laughed it off. Models weren't even dangerous yet. > Joined Vicarious ~ a startup trying to build AGI through robots. > Then OpenAI. Quietly. On the safety team. > Worked on something nobody was paying attention to: teaching GPT-3 to write code. > Then he watched it work. > A model. Writing the same code that trained it. > That was the moment. The future cracked open in front of him. > December 2020: he walked out of OpenAI with 10 others. > Built Anthropic from zero with Dario and Daniela Amodei. 🚀 > Today he runs the team that trains every version of Claude. > 40+ engineers. 27,000+ academic citations. > Two podcasts ever: one on AI safety (80,000 Hours, 2024), one on scaling laws (YC, 2025). Zero about himself.
May 19, 2026: Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic.
He reports to Nick.
The loudest minds get the headlines.
The quiet ones run the labs. 🐐
Andrej @karpathy is back in the game! I would have loved for him to rejoin @OpenAI, but I'm happy he's at any frontier lab pushing the field forward. It’s easy to frame this as zero-sum among the labs, but in truth we’re collectively advancing the most important tech of our era.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Karpathy going from OpenAI to Tesla to Anthropic
Karpathy was literally hired for RSI
he's starting a new pre-training team at Anthropic that focuses on autoresearch per Axios
Karpathy hasn't said what exactly he's going to work on, but I don't think he's getting into the weeds of optimizers or hardware or whatever
I think he's going to work on something higher-level
my best guess is auto-research
dang... @DarioAmodei is the best recruiter of our time!
this is like a leading franchise recruiting someone who’s simultaneously the best player & the league’s best broadcaster & its most watched developmental coach all in one.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
im hearing rumors that Anthropic gave Andrej a 6 figure salary
(hourly)
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
the future is bright, lets get to work
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
How funny would it be if he fixed like three things that annoy him and quit
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
This is a little bit insane. I don't know how you read this other than to interpret it as Anthropic being the expected ASI winner based on insider expectations.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
Anthropic has claimed the mandate of heaven.
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.
@karpathy Andrej, this is great news. It makes me hopeful for humanity that you’ll be at the center of it all.
@karpathy Ai labs feels more like football clubs nowdays.........
