Anthropic has announced Mike Krieger’s appointment as chief product officer. Krieger co-founded Instagram and, more recently, the personalised news app Artifact (which Yahoo just purchased).
Anthropic claims that Krieger will be in charge of product engineering, management, and design as the business aims to increase the number of its AI applications and introduce Claude, its generative AI technology, to a larger market. Apart from consumer-oriented initiatives such as the just-launched Claude mobile app, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s software, subscriptions, and business services.
In a statement, Krieger said, “I’ve long admired Anthropic’s tireless commitment to developing effective and trustworthy AI systems that empower people and broaden what’s possible with technology.” Working with the outstanding Anthropic team to create and develop revolutionary products like Claude excites me. I think Anthropic has the skill, values, and technology to help realise the enormous promise of AI to improve the world.
Mike is a world-class engineer, constructor, and leader, said Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. His expertise in creating logical products and user experiences will come in very handy as we build new ways for people to engage with Claude, especially at work. It gives us great pleasure to have Mike join our leadership team with his vision and experience.
Two years after Meta (formerly Facebook) paid $1 billion to buy Instagram, Krieger and fellow co-founder Kevin Systrom quit the social media network. He and Systrom joined up to introduce Artefact in January 2023 with the intention of creating recommender systems that would compile and recommend news items, subjects, and writers while enabling the larger public to like and comment on them.
Yahoo acquired Artefact in April for an undisclosed sum, following its initial announcement of shutting down in early 2024. Following the purchase, Krieger and Systrom collaborated in an “advisory capacity,” but that cooperation seems to be coming to an end.
Anthropic hired Krieger days after Anthropic competitor OpenAI demonstrated a more conversational, polished experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and Google unveiled significant improvements to its Gemini chatbot technology at the IT giant’s I/O developer conference. It appears that Anthropic is also eager to aggressively pursue the consumer market and thinks Krieger is the best guy to do it.
