Karpathy will start this week on Anthropic's pre-training team, which is responsible for the massive training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities, according to Anthropic.

Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/19/anthropic-openai-karpathy-a...

Funny. He foreshadowed this in a recent interview. Saying that he may fall out of touch with evolving approaches and if any of the frontier labs would have him, he’d be interested.

https://youtu.be/kwSVtQ7dziU?t=47m50s

He’s a great educator and seems like a genuinely nice guy, at least on interviews. I hope he continues with his teaching career on the side, although the crazy amount of NDAs he probably had to sign may make that effort a bit difficult.

“Master Control Program’s been snapping up all us programs who believe. If he thinks you’re useful, he takes over all your functions so he gets bigger.”

— Ram, Tron (1982)

Anyone else fearing Anthropic more and more each day? Not from a perspective that they are doing so well, but rather that it's like an industry tornado, sucking up and destroying everything in it's path.

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Karpathy is talented and to me he always seemed like someone who would be against building something like skynet. Anthropic is lucky to have him.

Karpathy's career arc feels similar to Jim Keller's; a butterfly flitting from one flower to another, gathering experiences and creating magic everywhere they go.

Selfishly, I hope this doesn't reduce to 0 the amount of time he spends doing educational content, which seems like a particular strength of his. I presume this means Eureka Labs is not releasing any product or course.

Good for him. His learning materials are unmatched, but I don’t think there was a viable path with his educational company.

the glorified marketer framing in this thread is missing the bigger signal. karpathy publicly pausing eureka labs to join anthropic is an ai founder of his caliber effectively conceding that verticals get eaten by frontier upgrades.for everyone here building on top of foundation, that's the actual news

I wonder what will happen with EurekaLabs now. I checked their X account, but the posts are now restricted. However, the background picture... that old AI-generated image feels surprisingly cringe (https://x.com/EurekaLabsAI/header_photo), incredible how much GenAI has improved since that image was created.

He should have done his own lab. He seems like someone capable of it and might bring some unique ideas.

Sir, please make it easy to break the twitter/x moat. Why don't we have an app that just posts to all the socials like bluesky/mastodon/threads etc

He moves around quite a bit. Less than 2 years on average if you take away the longest and shortest jobs. It feels like this is just a celebrity hire to help raise IPO value, and then he'll move again when the tech hits another real-world scaling wall. Expect another short stint (stunt) with Anthropic.

Karpathy is probably one of the biggest names in AI, I do wonder where he fits now. He's sort of bounced around Tesla back to OpenAI back to independent. He sort of left OpenAI before it really hit the inflection point, and he was at Tesla for a long time and they didn't really deliver what they wanted on the AI side. Now he's bounced around a few places. I understand that the leaders in this market play this silly game of trying to buy up the names like trading cards but I wonder what this turns into.

interesting signal about where AI is...

It actually feels like a signal that it is in a tapering phase.

As in, if it was in a growth phase a freeform, solo - collab with who you want, would be more beneficial. But in a tapering phase you'd want structure and to be in the private formal meetings.

just an idea

He is citing R&D? I have always been under the impression that he is an image recognition etc. expert rather than an LLM expert.

So, does Anthropic pivot to military tech or pretend to do so before the IPO?

Or is this simply a deal where he uses his formidable influencer skills for Anthropic and gets to cash in on the IPO?

We are in the early stages of AI. Anthropic is Altavista and OpenAI is AskJeeves or something. 10-20 years from now the scene will be unrecognizable and all of this will be inconsequential but at the same time it is the fondation on which tomorrow is built.

Wondering what the plan is to steward Eureka Labs, LLM101n, and whatever else was being cooked up. As a fellow educator, was very much looking forward to seeing how this would have evolved things.

Karpathy is so valuable as an educator to the whole world, and I wish he continue to communicate with us after joining Anthropic. Just concepts like "Software 2.0" and "Vibe Cording" are priceless!

I wonder if the timing of this, coming so soon after the Musk/Anthropic data center deal is just coincidence or not?

From Karpathy's various interviews I get the impression that he wants to leave the door open to working for Musk again at some point, perhaps on TeslaBot.

With Musk for now regarding Anthropic as a partner (or at least an enemy of his enemy), that seems to mean that Karpathy joining them is less likely to anger Musk than might otherwise have been the case. Who knows, maybe Karpathy was involved in brokering this data center deal?

Karpathy is a terrific communicator and populariser of the LLM landscape, and I do hope this isn't going to mean his work in that regard now gets dropped, or dropped into a private Anthropic-only void.

Anyone want to comment on what it's like to work for Anthropic (as an ordinary software/AI engineer, not as Karpathy)?

Compare and contrast with working at OpenAI, Google, etc.?

Looks like they sprinkled their ipo money on him.

Truly makes me positive about the future. Thanks Andrej

Anthropic is on a roll:

- best harness overall (well maybe until like a month ago when gpt5.5 and codex came out)

- acquires bun

- acquires stainless for SDKs

- deal with Elon for compute

- karpathy

what else did I miss?

Who cares mate?

What's your guess, how much stock / cash he got?

(I also assume they gave him a ton of independence in R&D)

Congrats Andrej. Let me know if you are looking for someone to take over Eureka Labs. We were in the same WoW classic guild. domrdy on x. We can duel for it :). Also, I need $10M if any VCs are reading this.

I will never get why anybody wants to work for FAGMAN. It's depressing how many talents put money above integrity.

You don't need to live in the bay area, most civilized places on earth let you live a comfortable life with a 10th of the salary, plus you are not selling your soul.

We are doing interesting R&D in other fields too, in places you would never believe.

Andrej has decided to become a billionaire. Anthropic keeps preparing for the IPO. I wish they IPO soon, let everyone see how the earnings look like.

The big question is... Why now? What happened to Eureka Labs?

Maybe the IPO potential was just too great to ignore and maybe AGI (A Giant IPO) is around the corner.

Interesting if his educational startup turned out to be less perspective at least with the current gen of llms.

Anyone have any stats on just what the headcount is at Anthropic and OpenAI these days?

I have been impressed by some of his work, especially on the vulgarisation and simplification. Excellent communicator and engineer. But I am a bit more skeptical about his taste and vision.

Leaving OpenAI to work for Elon Musk was a poor move, and AFAIK his work on CV at Tesla did not bring anything groundbreaking, unfortunately probably the opposite (the bet on camera-only driven system did not pay off) and his talks about the approach would indicate that his whole idea to make it work was nothing more than hill-climbing.

Also, his over-reaction to the whole Claw thing was a bit ridiculous, in my opinion.

I don't see him as a Scientist in the field, but more as an efficient tinkerer.

Andrej: Guys, thank you for the interest but I'm really focused on this education thing rn

Anthropic: Okay, let's add two zeroes

Andrej: I am very excited to join Anthropic!

(I do not blame him, I think this is reasonable, I find the whole money-falling-from-the-sky thing amusing :-)

Great person and great company

I hope he still gets to do some educative stuff on the side too

Sudevo7x

I can't help but feel like someone with Karpathy's experience and financial resources would start their own company if they had real creativity and vision.

Sudev ray

good name recognition for Anthropic mega IPO. everything Anthropic does now is all gear toward its IPO from buying Bun, Stainless, getting big name AI guy to join...etc.

Way too late.

Congrats to Karpathy. I wonder whether this is the right time to join Anthropic. Looks like it from the outside.

But - unpopular opinion - I believe Anthropic is one open-source model away (that can code well) from a massive revenue/stock crash. We're already seeing Claude's cost escalate to astronomical levels. Most coding work is medium difficulty in the grand scheme of things. So the future is an open source model small enough to fit in your local 16GB VRAM, giving you a Claude Code like experience for zero token cost. That's going to wipe out most of Anthropic's current revenue base. It does have several cool initiatives in the pipeline, but bad things happen once your bread and butter is threatened (just ask OpenAI).

Sort of makes me sad, but . . . everyone has a price.

Money always wins.

Bravo Andrej

Meta: Why 1000 votes?

Great communicator. It’s sad that he had joined a closed llm org. I would have expected him to join forces with someone else releasing open-source models rivaling chinese model landscape. Capital always accumulates to the capital holder in capitalism :)

I would like to announce I've retired. The tech industries are screwed and the future is paper.

This is good he is best of best

Honestly happy he’s back at a foundation lab. He will have insane impact there. Of course one of the best educators in the world it’s a bit sad he gave up building and education tool.

Why is this title not editorialized like others when it's ambiguous?

It feels like every single tweet he makes is a hit

Immense respect for Karpathy but are these people that optimistic about AI?

I mean short gig, few million dollars for Karpathy so makes sense for him but others should read the Cloudflare's report about the super scary model that Anthropic wouldn't release because they love humanity more than their balance sheet.

> I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time.

"However, it turns out, my deep passion can easily be put on hold with money. Also I'm not really sure what the definition of passionate is."

I think this signals game over in the arms race.

Hope he can teach Claude how to not be so lame at coding.

I have respect for Karpathy. Not for anyone who made Claude or promotes it. So this is a shame. But I can't fault anyone for accepting an offer with (I assume) lots of 0's in the dollar part.

Looks like the one sector of the commercial AI world that will outlast the open source - local hardware transition is the military-industrial sector. I wonder what kind of classification-security rating is needed these days for onboarding?

“According to reports from The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, the AI model Claude, developed by Anthropic, was used in the initial U.S.-Israel military operations against Iran in late February 2026. The system, integrated into a platform developed by defense contractor Palantir, assisted with intelligence analysis, scenario planning, and targeting for strikes that resulted in the death of Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei”

https://biggo.com/news/202603032121_Anthropic_Claude_AI_Used...

Well at least he knows what not to do now.

He's a good educator, sometimes. But these days it seems like he's mostly gone of the deep end of being an LLM salesman.

Smart move

Somebody got showered with stock options.

Pretty big talent win for Anthropic. Karpathy is one of those people who was working on AI before it became "a thing," and he's definitely both a thought leader and influential practitioner today.

And now, a message from an actual deck chair on the Titanic

Does this count as news now on HN?

Guys ...

Skynet is winning.

My personal update: just quit playing modded Minecraft. Thinking of downloading Apex Legends. What is everyone doing?

whatever happened at Eureka labs?

We can expect more "vibe coding", "summoning ghosts" like expressions in the future now officially from Anthropic. I need him to add more videos to his channel on agentic coding. Looks like that won't happen anytime soon.

hahahaha

Recently on the all in podcast, they talked about how Anthropic is probably the next big monopoly. Given how quickly they have been growing and all of the products they are pushing out rapidly (even if they are sloppy), the acquisitions, and the people they are hiring, it feels like that may actually end up being true.

But what is the solution? I don’t think it is safe for a society built on free speech and other liberal values to have a couple extremely powerful companies controlling all our information and imposing their rules and their politics on top of us. It was bad enough under the FAANG companies. This will be worse.

Personally I’m not comfortable with how much power Anthropic is accumulating. And with them partnering shamelessly with Elon Musk to use a datacenter powered by potentially illegal natural gas turbines, I feel like Dario is just not trustworthy.

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AI news and ESPN feels interchangeable sometimes.

Thanks for introducing me to xcancel

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didnt he foreshadow this in a recent interview? lmao

This just in: AI Superstar tweets about new stint. Crowd goes wild. News at eleven.

Well, I am listening.

very interesting news... we are living in exciting times.

This guy is the next Ted Bundy.

Someone who already over a year ago said that he barely touches keyboard does not really have my confidence as a tech person.