AI talent war: Who is Andrej Karpathy, Anthropic's latest star hire behind the term 'vibe coding'?

Anthropic has hired prominent artificial intelligence researcher Andrej Karpathy, one of the best-known figures in the field and a former senior scientist at OpenAI and Tesla executive, in a major win in the intensifying battle for top AI talent.

Karpathy announced the move on Tuesday in a post on X.

"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," he wrote, referring to large language models. "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time."

The hire is one of Anthropic's most high-profile talent acquisitions as competition escalates among leading AI companies including OpenAI, Google and Meta Platforms to recruit researchers capable of advancing increasingly powerful AI systems.

Karpathy began this week at Anthropic's pre-training division, according to posts by company executives.

"Excited to welcome Andrej to the Pretraining team!" Nick Joseph, Anthropic's head of pre-training and a former OpenAI researcher, wrote on X. "He'll be building a team focused on using Claude to accelerate pretraining research itself. I can't think of anyone better suited to do it."

Pre-training is the large-scale, compute-intensive phase in which frontier AI models ingest massive amounts of data to develop their core capabilities and knowledge.

Anthropic spokesperson said Karpathy will build a team focussed on using the company's Claude models to accelerate pre-training research itself, reported TechCrunch.

Karpathy was a founding research scientist at OpenAI, where he worked until 2017.

He later joined Tesla and led the team responsible for the neural network and computer vision components of its Autopilot advanced driver-assistance system until 2022.

He returned to OpenAI in 2023 but departed again in early 2024. He then launched Eureka Labs, a startup focussed on applying AI assistants to education.

Karpathy has become one of the most influential voices in the AI community, known for detailed essays and social media posts explaining technical developments to a larger audience.

He is also credited with popularising the term "vibe coding," which he described as a style of software development "where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists."

The phrase has come to describe a workflow in which programmers guide AI assistants using natural language rather than writing software line by line.

"The hottest new programming language is English," Karpathy wrote in a January 2023 post on X that remains pinned to his profile.

More recently, he has argued that AI coding tools are evolving beyond simple assistance to a model where autonomous agents perform much of the programming work under human supervision.

In February, he said his preferred term for this approach was "agentic engineering."

Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives and researchers, including siblings Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei. The company has emerged as one of OpenAI's strongest rivals, gaining traction with coding tools and enterprise AI products built around its Claude family of models.