Anthropic’s new CPO is Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger

As Anthropic tries to take on the AI giants, it has a new big-name executive on board: the company announced this morning that Mike Krieger is its new chief product officer. Krieger, of course, was one of the co-founders of Instagram and spent the last few years working on Artifact, an AI news-reading app that was recently acquired by Yahoo.

Krieger will oversee all of Anthropic’s product efforts going forward. It’s an important moment for the company to push hard on product, too: it recently released the Claude app for iOS, long after a bunch of its competitors were available on mobile, and just announced support for use in Spanish, French, Italian, and German. Anthropic, which was founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has been seemingly primarily focused on building out its core technology for the last few years but seems to understand that it needs to turn all that tech into products — and there’s no time to waste.

Because I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and seemingly everybody else is racing as fast as possible to put AI models in everything. The underlying tech is changing fast, and the products through which people use them are evolving even faster.

“Mike’s background in developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Claude, particularly in the workplace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a statement announcing the hire. “We feel fortunate to add Mike’s vision and expertise to our leadership team.” That bit about the workplace is interesting: it sounds like Krieger’s job may be to find business-focused uses for Claude, at least at first.

The AI space is blisteringly hot right now, and there’s more new stuff and more noisy hype practically every day. Krieger built a massively successful company in a massively competitive landscape once before; the stakes might be even higher this time.