Tuesday 19 May 2026 13:53 EDT Bookmark Support Now From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it. Your support makes all the difference. Read more Andrej Karpathy, a former Tesla AI executive and one of OpenAI's founding members, has joined Anthropic, the Claude maker, he announced on Tuesday. This move strengthens the company as it looks to dominate the AI race. "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," Karpathy said in an X post. He has joined Anthropic's pretraining team, responsible for the large-scale training runs that give Claude its core knowledge and capabilities. He started work this week and sits on the team of Nick Joseph, the company's head of pretraining. Karpathy, a highly influential member of the AI community, played a key role in developing Tesla's self-driving and artificial intelligence technology before leaving the firm in 2022. He studied under prominent Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li and joined OpenAI as one of its earliest staffers, before moving to Tesla. Stanford AI scientist Fei-Fei Li (Getty) "I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time," Karpathy, who announced in 2024 that he was starting an AI-integrated education platform named Eureka Labs, said on X. Karpathy's move follows that of John Schulman, another OpenAI co-founder, who left for Anthropic in 2024. The ChatGPT maker has seen a slew of executives leave the firm, including former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and former tech chief Mira Murati. Anthropic has been grappling with strong competition from rival frontier model developers such as OpenAI as they seek to create the most sophisticated models for cloud providers. More about