Anthropic just scored a major AI hire: Andrej Karpathy, the former Tesla AI boss who coined ‘vibe coding’

• The AI researcher who coined “vibe coding” has joined Anthropic.
• Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and Tesla’s former AI director, is joining Anthropic’s pretraining team.
• Karpathy’s social media posts about the state of AI have become widely read among the community.

Anthropic just landed one of the biggest names in AI.

Andrej Karpathy, the OpenAI founding member who was formerly Tesla’s director of AI, announced on Tuesday that he had joined Anthropic.

Karpathy famously coined the term “vibe coding” and is prolific in the AI community, frequently publishing lengthy social media posts about the state of the industry that are widely read.

“Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative,” Karpathy wrote on X. “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 said Karpathy will work on the AI startup’s pretraining team, which is responsible for large-scale testing of Claude. Karpathy started this week and sits on the team led by Nicholas Joseph, another ex-OpenAIer who was an early employee at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival in the AI race.

“I can’t think of anyone better suited to do it — looking forward to what we build together!!” Joseph wrote on X.

Karpathy helped launch OpenAI as a founding research scientist before leaving for a stint at Tesla as its AI director, leading the Tesla Autopilot computer vision team, before rejoining OpenAI in 2023. He publicly supported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman during his brief ouster, but ultimately left OpenAI again in February 2024 and later started Eureka Labs, an AI-centered education company.

Interest in Anthropic has skyrocketed in 2026, thanks to major advancements in the company’s Claude Code and Cowork tools and a boost in broader public interest following a tussle with the Trump administration.

At the same time, Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAI has reached a fever pitch. Altman recently accused Anthropic of helping to fuel the hate toward him that led to an attack on his house.