Anthropic hires Instagram co-founder as head of product

Mike Krieger, one of the co-founders of Instagram and, more recently, the co-founder of personalized news app Artifact (which TechCrunch corporate parent Yahoo recently acquired), is joining Anthropic as the company's first chief product officer.

As CPO, Krieger will oversee Anthropic's product engineering, management and design efforts, Anthropic says, as the company works to expand its suite of AI apps and bring Claude, its generative AI technology, to a wider audience. In addition to consumer-focused projects like the recently released Claude app for mobile, Krieger also will be responsible for Anthropic's enterprise services, subscriptions and software.

"I've long admired Anthropic's relentless focus on building capable and trustworthy AI systems that empower humans and expand what's possible with technology," Krieger said in a statement. "I'm thrilled to join the exceptional team at Anthropic and partner with them to design and scale transformative products like Claude. The potential for AI to positively impact the world is immense, 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 media platform for $1 billion. He and Systrom teamed up to launch Artifact in January 2023 with the goal of developing recommender 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 that it would wind down operations in early 2024 but, in April, was snapped up by Yahoo for an undisclosed amount. Krieger worked alongside Systrom in an "advisory capacity" after the acquisition; that work's at an end, it seems.

Krieger's hire comes days after Anthropic rival OpenAI demoed a more conversational, polished experience for ChatGPT, its AI-powered chatbot platform, and after Google previewed major upgrades to its Gemini chatbot tech at the tech giant's I/O developer conference. Anthropic, it seems, is keen to go aggressively after the consumer market too -- and believes Krieger is the right person to get it there.

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