Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger takes charge of Anthropic’s AI Labs

CALIFORNIA: Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, is stepping into a more experimental role at Anthropic, moving from chief product officer to lead the company’s newly expanded AI Labs group.

After two years overseeing product strategy, Krieger will now focus on building directly with Anthropic’s models, working hands-on inside Labs to explore what Claude can do at the edges. The move signals a return to a maker mindset, swapping polished roadmaps for prototypes, tests and early user feedback.

Anthropic says the shift reflects both the pace of AI development and Krieger’s strengths as a builder. Labs is designed to incubate experimental ideas, pressure-test new capabilities and shape early products before they are scaled for a wider audience.

Krieger joined Anthropic in 2024 after co-founding Artifact and spending nearly a decade building Instagram from a simple photo-sharing app into a global platform. His move into Labs echoes that early chapter, where curiosity, speed and iteration mattered more than certainty.

For Anthropic, placing one of Silicon Valley’s best-known product creators at the heart of experimentation underlines how central Labs is to its future. For Krieger, it is a shift back to the thrill of making, this time at the frontier of artificial intelligence.