Instagram co-founder appointed as Chief Product Officer at Anthropic

As Anthropic's first Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, a co-founder of Instagram and the personalized news app Artefact, will join the company. Krieger will be in charge of Anthropic's management, design, and product engineering as CPO. Krieger will also be responsible for Anthropic’s enterprise services, subscriptions and software for its Claude app for mobile.

“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.

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.