Former tech leaders join AI labs amid industry shift toward compute and product roles

Tom Blomfield, co-founder of GoCardless and Monzo and a former Y Combinator Group Partner, announced he is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic’s compute team as a member of technical staff. His decision mirrors a pattern among established tech figures who are re-engaging directly in AI development rather than remaining in advisory or executive roles.

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram, joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer in 2024, while Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI and former AI lead at Tesla who later founded Eureka Labs, joined Anthropic’s pre-training team in May 2026. Karpathy framed his move similarly to Blomfield’s, stating that the next few years at the frontier of large language models would be especially formative.

Peter Bailis, who became Workday’s CTO in 2025, left the role in March 2026 to join Anthropic as a member of technical staff. The shift from a CTO position overseeing AI strategy at an $8 billion-revenue company to a technical individual contributor role at an AI lab underscores the perceived value of direct involvement in AI development.

Not all moves are toward existing labs. Chamath Palihapitiya, known as the “SPAC King,” took his first full-time operating role in over a decade as CEO of 8090 Labs, an enterprise AI coding startup he founded. The company announced a $135 million Series A led by Salesforce Ventures in July 2026. Palihapitiya described the decision as driven by conviction that the work was critically important.

Eric Wu, former CEO of Opendoor, launched NavigateAI in 2026, an AI copilot for construction workers. The startup raised $25 million in seed funding. Wu stated that the decision was motivated by a belief that not participating in AI would lead to regret in the long term.