Lightning strike in the world of AI: the cofounder of OpenAI joins the ranks of Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, one of the leading names in AI, has announced his arrival at Anthropic. In a short message posted on his X page, the Slovak-Canadian engineer explains being convinced that « the next years at the forefront of LLMs (NDLR: large language model, i.e. grand modèle de langage in French) will be particularly formative ». He says he is thrilled to join the team and resume his activities in « research and development ».

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 (@karpathy) May 19, 2026

He is best known as the co-founder of OpenAI. He thus participated in the creation of ChatGPT, one of the most well-known AI systems in the world. After founding OpenAI, he worked as an engineer at Tesla. Under Elon Musk’s direction, Karpathy oversaw the visual development of the Autopilot. That’s not all. In the meantime, he spent two years on education and AI popularization through his own company, Eureka Labs.

Also read: Anthropic turns to SpaceX to double Claude's throughput, but there's a catch

A key role at Anthropic

By joining Anthropic, the researcher is returning to his first love: research. As a specialist in deep neural networks and language models, he is joining one of the most technical units at Anthropic, the one focused

Under the direction of Nick Joseph, head of AI model training, Karpathy will first be tasked with setting up a new team. This team will be responsible for exploring how AI can use itself to automate and optimize certain steps in its own development. In short, Anthropic wants to entrust AI with creating AI. This is one of the major research focuses aimed at accelerating the generation of large models. If the pre-training team can better optimize the training phases, it could result concretely in faster, more accurate, and less hallucination-prone models.

First week on the @AnthropicAI Frontier Red Team

The speed of AI progress is astounding. We have a real opportunity in front of us to dramatically improve cyber security with AI. I can’t think of a better company or team to join at this critical moment in time.

— chrisrohlf (@chrisrohlf) May 19, 2026

Also read: OpenAI launches Daybreak, the AI that detects and fixes security flaws in minutes

OpenAI vs Anthropic

The hiring of Karpathy fits into Anthropic's large-scale recruitment strategy. Determined to overshadow OpenAI, the US company is intensifying its efforts to attract top researchers, including by poaching from its competitor's staff. Two years ago, Anthropic actually recruited John Schulman, co-founder of OpenAI and a key figure in ChatGPT. The researcher definitively left Sam Altman's lab to join Anthropic, justifying his departure by his desire to focus more on the AI alignment. The computer scientist also wanted to return to technical and practical work and abandon business management and corporate strategy. John Schulman eventually defected from Anthropic a few months later to join Thinking Machines Lab, where he is now the chief scientist. In parallel, OpenAI made a significant strategic shift to catch up with the lag on its rival, particularly in the productivity and enterprise market. OpenAI thus chose to cut costs on several projects deemed too costly for their returns, such as its social network Sora. The startup wants to do everything to have ChatGPT overshadow Claude. In addition, ChatGPT has been recording a wave of uninstalls in recent weeks. Many users are defecting to turn to Claude, an alternative perceived as more ethical since the scandal of OpenAI's partnership with the US military.

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