He's Back. (Again.)

On Tuesday 19 May, the boomerang autodidact announced on X that he had joined Anthropic. Personal update. I’ve joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. He will lead a team using Claude to accelerate Claude’s own pre-training, reporting to Nick Joseph.

This is his fifth career stop in eleven years and the third time he has left OpenAI. He has not yet worked at Meta or DeepMind. He has, per his own X post, retained plans to “resume” his AI-education startup, Eureka Labs, “in time.”

The most chaotic résumé in his peer group is not, however, his. It belongs to John Schulman: OpenAI co-founder; resigned to Anthropic, August 2024; resigned from Anthropic to Thinking Machines, January 2025; chief scientist, currently. Three frontier labs in twenty-four months. Mira Murati — henceforth, in these pages, the founder-in-residence, who raised $2bn at a $12bn valuation on alumni capital before shipping a product — is, by this measure, two stops behind. Continued on page 5. →

The price has, for the first time, been printed. Meta has reportedly offered top OpenAI researchers signing packages above $100 million; for one unnamed engineer, the figure was $1.5 billion — and was turned down. Meta Superintelligence Labs — the name is real — is led by Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang, with ex-GitHub CEO Nat Friedman as a partner. The summer’s haul: seven from OpenAI, two from DeepMind, one from Anthropic, one from Sesame.

The openly-sweatered Sam Altman, asked about this on his brother’s podcast, said “none of [our] best people” took the offer. Two sentences later he allowed that Meta had “gotten a few great people.” The boomerang autodidact, on this occasion, was not among them.

Google has, by contrast, paid for its returns in cash. In August 2024 it acquihired Noam Shazeer — henceforth, in these pages, Cap’n Boomerang — for $2.5 billion, returning the engineer who had quit in 2021 over chatbot caution. His personal cut: ~$1 billion. He now co-leads Gemini.

Anthropic — henceforth the quiet hirer — has, in twelve months, added Leike, Schulman, Nordeen and the boomerang autodidact. It has not, for any of them, posted a smiling-team-photo.

Footnotes

1. The previous two: Schulman, August 2024. Leike, May 2024. Mrs Ng, the carpenter, has been retained on a fortnightly basis.
2. Karpathy on X, 19 May 2026. The post received, at filing, 47,000 likes and one reply from a former Tesla colleague reading “lol.”
3. Nick Joseph, Anthropic’s head of pre-training, has not posted publicly about the hire. Anthropic has not, for any of Leike, Schulman, Nordeen or the boomerang autodidact, posted a smiling-team-photo. See Horoscope, p. 18.
4. The phrase “in time” appears nowhere in Karpathy’s contract, which Compute! has not seen and is not implying it has.
5. Murati to The Information, 25 September 2024. The phrase will return in these pages. It always does.
6. Zoph: exit and re-hire same calendar day, 14 January 2026. The mode of a sample including a zero is, for the purposes of this magazine, zero.
7. Entrepreneur and Wired, 2025, on Zuckerberg’s reported $1.5bn package. The engineer is not named. The package is, by all reports, structured as equity. The equity is, by all reports, in Meta. The offer was, by all reports, declined.
8. BusinessInsider, 2025. The Sesame researcher’s name has been redacted in three of four published reports. The corkboard has him pinned anyway.
9. Calcalist, 2024. Shazeer reportedly owned 30–40% of Character.AI. The acquihire was structured as a licence, not an acquisition, for reasons unrelated to this magazine.
10. Time-and-space, per the subject’s standing statement to The Information, remains an explanatory variable rather than a dependent one. The regression has been withheld pending further exploration.

The Receipts

Every quote above is real — every source below is where it was said.

1. TechCrunch, “OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic’s pre-training team” · 19 May 2026.
2. Axios, “OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy joins Anthropic” · 19 May 2026.
3. CNBC, “Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader” · 19 May 2026.
4. VentureBeat, “OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy announces he’s joining Anthropic” · 19 May 2026.
5. Andrej Karpathy on X, “Personal update: I’ve joined Anthropic…” · 19 May 2026.
6. TechCrunch, “Anthropic hires former OpenAI safety lead to head up new team” · 28 May 2024 · Jan Leike.
7. Jan Leike on X, “…safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” · 17 May 2024.
8. CNBC, “Ex-Google engineers who founded Character.AI rejoin company with new AI partnership” · 2 August 2024 · Noam Shazeer.
9. The Wall Street Journal, on Google’s $2.7bn Character.AI acquihire · August 2024.
10. Calcalist, on Shazeer’s return to Google to co-lead Gemini · August 2024 · personal cut $750m–$1bn.
11. TechCrunch, “A co-lead on Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, has left for Google” · 3 October 2024 · Tim Brooks.
12. TechCrunch, “Mira Murati’s startup, Thinking Machines Lab, is losing two of its co-founders to OpenAI” · 14 January 2026 · Zoph & Metz.
13. Neowin, “Thinking Machines Lab CTO Barret Zoph returns to OpenAI in surprise move” · January 2026 · “unethical conduct”.
14. Wikipedia, “Thinking Machines Lab” — founding team incl. Schulman, Zoph, Weng; ~30 hires from OpenAI, Meta, Mistral.
15. CNBC, “OpenAI considering restructuring to for-profit, CTO Mira Murati and two top research execs depart” · 25 September 2024.
16. Business Insider, “Meta poached at least seven OpenAI researchers over the summer” · 2025.
17. eWeek, “Meta’s New Superintelligence Division: Who Has Been Hired” · 2025 · Wang, Friedman, Beyer, Yu, Bansal, et al.
18. The Next Web, “Meta hires five Thinking Machines Lab founders including a reported $1.5 billion engineer” · 2025.
19. Jack Altman podcast: Sam Altman on Meta’s poaching — “none of [our] best people” / “gotten a few great people” · 2025.
20. Wikipedia, “Anthropic” — founded 2021 by Dario & Daniela Amodei, ex-OpenAI; valuation $380bn (February 2026).
21. Wikipedia, “Safe Superintelligence” — co-founded by Ilya Sutskever, 2024; valued ~$32bn, 2025; no commercial product.
22. Wikipedia, “Andrej Karpathy” — career chronology (OpenAI 2015–17, Tesla 2017–22, OpenAI 2023–24, Eureka Labs 2024, Anthropic May 2026).
23. PwC, 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer — wage premium for AI-skilled roles +56%.