Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram and most recently co-founder of personalized messaging app Artifact (which TechCrunch parent company Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the corporate's first chief product officer.
As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic's product development, management and design efforts, Anthropic says, as the corporate works to expand its suite of AI apps and produce Claude, its generative AI technology, to a broader audience. In addition to consumer-focused projects comparable to the recently released Claude mobile app, Krieger may even be liable for Anthropic's enterprise services, subscriptions and software.
“I actually have long admired Anthropic’s relentless give attention to constructing powerful and trustworthy AI systems that empower people and expand the capabilities of technology,” Krieger said in a press release. “I’m excited to affix Anthropic’s exceptional team and work with them to design and scale transformative products like Claude. The potential for AI to positively impact the world is immense, and I consider Anthropic has the talent, principles and technology to understand this potential.”
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, added: “Mike is a world-class engineer, builder and executive. Claude's background in developing intuitive products and user experiences will probably be invaluable as we create recent ways for people to interact, particularly within the workplace. We feel fortunate so as to add Mike’s vision and expertise to our leadership team.”
Krieger left Instagram — together with Kevin Systrom, Instagram's other co-founder — in 2018, several years after Meta (then Facebook) acquired the social media platform for $1 billion. He and Systrom teamed up in January 2023 to launch Artifact, with the goal of developing advice systems to aggregate and suggest news articles, topics, and authors and permit the broader community to love and comment on that content.
Artifact initially announced it could stop operations in early 2024, but was acquired by Yahoo in April for an undisclosed amount. Krieger worked with Systrom in an “advisory capability” after the takeover; The work appears to be over.
Krieger's hiring comes days after Anthropic rival OpenAI showed off a chattier, more sophisticated experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and after Google previewed major upgrades to its Gemini platform on the tech giant's I/O developer conference. introduced chatbot technology. Anthropic also seems occupied with aggressively entering the patron market – and believes Krieger is the appropriate person to get there.
