OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic's pre-training team

Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic. He posted on X Tuesday that he has joined the company. Karpathy said he is excited to join the team and get back to research and development. Karpathy started this week at Anthropic where he is working on pre-training under team lead Nick Joseph. Pre-training is responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to the company. An Anthropic spokesperson told TechCrunch that Karpathy will start a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pre-training research. Karpathy co-founded OpenAI and previously led AI at Tesla. While at OpenAI he focused on deep learning and computer vision until he departed in 2017 to join Tesla. He led Tesla's Full Self-Driving and Autopilot programs before leaving in 2022. He then went back to OpenAI for one year before leaving again in 2024 to start Eureka Labs. Karpathy has taught an online course called Neural Networks: Zero to Hero and has a YouTube channel where he posts lectures on LLMs and AI. Karpathy said he remains deeply passionate about education and plans to resume his work on it in time. Separately, Anthropic has brought on Chris Rohlf to its frontier red team. Rohlf is a veteran of the cybersecurity industry with more than 20 years of experience. He previously worked at Yahoo's cybersecurity team known as The Paranoids and more recently at Meta where he worked for six years before joining Anthropic. Rohlf was also a fellow at Georgetown's Center for Security and Emerging Technology where he worked on the CyberAI project. Rohlf posted on X that there is a real opportunity to dramatically improve cyber security with AI. TechCrunch has reached out to Karpathy for comment.