Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, most recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch was recently acquired by Yahoo!), is joining Anthropic as the company’s first chief product officer.
As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic’s engineering, management and product design efforts, Anthropic says, as the company works to expand its suite of AI applications and bring Claude, its genetic AI technology, to a wider audience. In addition to consumer-focused projects such as the recently launched Claude mobile app, Krieger is also responsible for Anthropic’s enterprise services, subscriptions and software.
“I have long admired Anthropic’s relentless focus on building capable and reliable AI systems that empower people and expand what is possible with technology,” Krieger said in a statement. “I’m excited to join the great team at Anthropic and work with them to design and scale transformative products like Claude. The potential for AI to positively impact the world is enormous, and I believe Anthropic has the talent, principles and technology to help realize that potential.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei added: “Mike is a world-class engineer, builder and leader. His 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. We feel fortunate to add Mike’s vision and expertise to our leadership team.”
Krieger — along with Kevin Systrom, Instagram’s other co-founder — left Instagram in 2018 several years after Meta (then Facebook) acquired the social networking platform for $1 billion. He and Systrom teamed up to launch Artifact in January 2023 with the goal of developing recommendation systems to aggregate and suggest news articles, topics and authors, and allow the wider community to like and comment on that content.
Artifact initially announced it would cease operations in early 2024, but in April, it was acquired by Yahoo! for an unknown amount. Krieger worked with Systrom in an “advisory capacity” after the acquisition. that work is done, it seems.
Kriger’s hiring comes days after Anthropic competitor OpenAI unveiled a sleeker experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and after Google previewed major upgrades to its Gemini chatbot technology at the tech giant’s I/O developer conference. giant. Anthropic, it seems, wants to aggressively go after the consumer market as well — and it thinks Krieger is the right person to get it there.
