Brain War: Andrej Karpathy Leaves OpenAI for Rival Anthropic

Architects of generative models are changing the balance of power. On May 20, 2026, it was revealed that Andrej Karpathy—co-founder of OpenAI and former head of Tesla's AI division—officially joined the Anthropic team.

This is a monumental HR shift in the race for AGI. Karpathy will focus on the fundamental area of model pretraining. Given that Anthropic recently secured computing power from SpaceX and signed a $1.8 billion infrastructure contract with Akamai, the transfer of an expert of this caliber is the missing puzzle piece in the company's strategy. The departure of a key engineer from OpenAI to a direct competitor signals a deep internal rift in Sam Altman's empire and confirms that the technological leadership of GPT-5.5 is under serious threat from the Claude model family.

Source: Reuters / WSJ