Anthropic is making a bold move to accelerate innovation in the increasingly crowded AI race. Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger is stepping down from his role as chief product officer to co-lead the company's internal incubator, dubbed Labs, which focuses on building experimental AI products. The restructuring signals Anthropic's pivot toward rapid prototyping and market testing as competitors intensify their push to dominate enterprise and consumer AI.
Anthropic just signaled that speed and experimentation matter more than traditional corporate hierarchy. Mike Krieger, the Instagram co-founder who joined the AI company two years ago as its chief product officer, is ditching the executive title entirely. Instead, he's becoming a member of technical staff, reporting directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei and co-leading the Labs team alongside product engineering lead Ben Mann.
The Labs unit itself is the real story here. Launched quietly in mid-2024 with just two people, it's now expanding into a full-fledged incubator for what Anthropic calls "experimental products." The company wants to double the team's headcount within the next six months, signaling serious investment in this parallel innovation track. It's a structure that echoes how OpenAI has approached ChatGPT development—building things that might feel risky or unfinished to ship under the main product banner, but could unlock entirely new use cases.
Krieger's move is striking because he's voluntarily stepping back from a traditional power position. In a statement, he explained the thinking: "We've reached a watershed moment in AI—model capabilities are advancing so fast that the window to shape how they're used is now. That's why I'm getting back into builder mode, moving from my role as CPO and joining our Labs team: I want to be hands-on at the frontier, building products that channel AI toward solving the world's hardest problems."
This isn't a demotion dressed up in corporate speak. Krieger's essentially saying the most important work right now isn't managing product strategy—it's building things. That's a notable statement from someone who spent years scaling one of the world's largest social networks.
Amid Vora, Anthropic's current head of product, takes over Krieger's responsibilities and will work closely with CTO Rahul Patil to scale the company's Claude model across both enterprise and consumer markets. This creates cleaner organizational separation: Vora handles the core product roadmap and scaling, while Labs operates as an R&D division freed from traditional product constraints.
The timing matters. Anthropic is facing unprecedented competition from OpenAI, , and as the industry consolidates around foundational AI models and competing implementations. According to reports, Anthropic is planning to raise $10 billion on a $350 billion valuation, which means investors are expecting more than just incremental improvements to Claude. They want proof that Anthropic can move faster than rivals and ship products that actually capture market share.
