Anthropic launches Anthropic Labs consumer product unit

Anthropic gave public shape to Labs, an internal team that had existed quietly since mid-2024, and put Mike Krieger — the Instagram co-founder who had spent two years as Anthropic’s chief product officer — in charge of it alongside engineer Ben Mann. Krieger gave up his executive title to become an ordinary member of technical staff, reporting to president Daniela Amodei. Ami Vora, who had joined Anthropic only weeks earlier from Faire and Meta, moved into Krieger’s former role leading the broader product organisation, working with chief technology officer Rahul Patil.

Labs was described as the unit responsible for building experimental products at the edge of what Claude could do — “tinkering,” in Amodei’s framing, with unpolished versions tested on early users before anything is scaled up for enterprise or mass-market release. Anthropic credited the approach with several of its highest-profile launches to date, including Claude Code (which it said grew from a research preview into a billion-dollar product within six months), the Model Context Protocol, Claude in Chrome, Skills and Cowork. Starting with two people in 2024, the team was to double in size over the following six months.

The reorganisation signalled that Anthropic, still primarily known for enterprise and developer-facing tools, was investing more deliberately in consumer product development, competing more directly with OpenAI’s ChatGPT on features rather than only on underlying model capability. Krieger’s move — trading a C-suite title for a hands-on building role — was itself read as a statement about what the company wanted to reward: speed and shipped products over managerial hierarchy.