Anthropic Hires Instagram Co-Founder

Anthropic is appointing Mike Krieger, a co-founder of personalized news application Artifact and a former co-founder of Instagram, as its first chief product officer

In his capacity as CPO, Anthropic states that Krieger will supervise the organization’s product engineering, management, and design endeavors. This comes as Anthropic strives to broaden the reach of its generative AI technology, Claude, and enhance its suite of AI applications.

Krieger will manage Anthropic enterprise services, subscriptions, software, and consumer-oriented initiatives, such as the recently released Claude mobile application.

Krieger said, “I’ve long admired Anthropic unwavering commitment to developing trustworthy and capable AI systems that empower humans and push the boundaries of technological possibility.” 

“I am ecstatic to become a member of the marvelous Anthropic team and collaborate with them to develop and expand revolutionary products such as Claude. AI can significantly influence society for the better. Anthropologists possess the requisite expertise, principles, and technology to realize this immense potential.

According to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, Mike is an engineer, constructor, and leader of international caliber. Particularly in the workplace, his experience developing intuitive products and user experiences will prove invaluable as we develop new methods for individuals to interact with Claude. We are privileged to have Mike’s vision and knowledge join our executive team.

Krieger and Kevin Systrom, the other co-founders of Instagram, departed from the social media platform in 2018, several years after Meta’s (formerly Facebook) acquisition of the business for $1 billion.

Together with Systrom, he and Systrom established Artifact in January 2023 to create recommender systems that could compile and propose news articles, topics, and authors while enabling the broader community to engage with the content through likes and comments.

In April, Yahoo paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Artifact, which had initially intended to cease operations in early 2024. Following the acquisition, Krieger collaborated with Systrom in an “advisory capacity”; this collaboration appears to have concluded.

Days after Anthropic competitor OpenAI demonstrated a more refined, conversational experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and after Google previewed significant enhancements to its Gemini chatbot technology at the tech giant’s I/O developer conference, Krieger was hired. Anthropic is also eager to pursue the consumer market aggressively, and Krieger is the ideal candidate.