OpenAI Co-founder Andrej Karpathy Joins Anthropic

Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former head of AI at Tesla, announced on X on May 19, 2026, that he had joined Anthropic. Within the pretraining team, he will lead a recursive self-improvement project to "use Claude to improve Claude." Among Silicon Valley VCs, many view this appointment as a symbol of Anthropic establishing an advantage as a talent magnet at the research frontier, and the view is spreading that it will also serve as a tailwind for the next funding phase, with an IPO within range.