# Niki Parmar, Transformer co-author, joins Anthropic technical staff

Digest AI · Business & Funding · published 2026-09-30T23:25:00Z

Canonical: https://digestai.news/story/niki-parmar-transformer-co-author-joins-anthropic-technical-staff

## Summary

Niki Parmar, a co-author of the foundational "Attention Is All You Need" paper, has joined Anthropic as a member of its technical staff. Parmar, who previously co-founded Adept AI Labs and Essential AI, is now focusing on reinforcement learning research. Her work at Anthropic targets hard exploration tasks, frontier model capabilities, and test-time scaling. She has stated that her contributions helped develop Claude 3.7 Sonnet, a hybrid reasoning model released in February 2025.

Parmar’s career began at Google Research, where she helped create the Transformer architecture that underpins modern large language models like GPT and BERT. Before joining Anthropic in December 2024, she served as CTO at Adept AI Labs, which focused on "action models" for enterprise automation. She later co-founded Essential AI in January 2023 with Ashish Vaswani to build full-stack AI products for business workflows. Her move to Anthropic follows a trend of senior technical leaders joining the company in research roles rather than executive positions.

The article highlights Parmar’s journey from studying in Pune, India, to becoming a key figure in global AI development. Her Google Scholar citation count exceeds 315,000, reflecting the wide influence of her research. Her current role involves refining the reasoning capabilities of systems built on the architecture she helped invent, continuing her work at the frontier of AI development.

## Key points

- Niki Parmar, co-author of the Transformer paper, joined Anthropic technical staff in December 2024.
- She previously co-founded Adept AI Labs and Essential AI with Ashish Vaswani.
- Parmar works on reinforcement learning and contributed to the development of Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

## Why it matters

Parmar’s move to Anthropic strengthens the company’s research capabilities in reinforcement learning and model reasoning. As a co-inventor of the Transformer architecture, her presence underscores the deep technical expertise driving the development of frontier AI models like Claude.

## Sources

1. [Indians Leading AI Revolution: Niki Parmar, Co-founder, Essential AI & Adept AI Labs; Technical Staff, Anthropic](https://analyticsinsight.net/people/indians-leading-ai-revolution-niki-parmar-co-founder-essential-ai-adept-ai-labs-technical-staff-anthropic) (analyticsinsight.net, 2026-09-30)

## Cite

Digest AI, "Niki Parmar, Transformer co-author, joins Anthropic technical staff", 30 September 2026, https://digestai.news/story/niki-parmar-transformer-co-author-joins-anthropic-technical-staff

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