Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger will join artificial intelligence firm Anthropic as chief product officer, the company announced Wednesday.
Krieger, the former chief technology officer of Meta-owned Instagram, grew the platform to 1 billion users and increased its engineering team to more than 450 people during his time there, per a release.
He and Instagram’s other co-founder, Kevin Systrom, most recently built the personalized news app Artifact and sold it to Yahoo.
Around this time last year, Anthropic had only rolled out the first version of its chatbot without any consumer access or major fanfare.
Now, it’s one of the hottest AI startups, with a product that directly competes with OpenAI’s ChatGPT in both the enterprise and consumer worlds.
Krieger’s hiring is likely meant to further that competition.
The generative AI startup is the company behind Claude, one of the chatbots that, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, has rocketed in popularity in the past year.
“Mike will oversee Anthropic’s product engineering, product management, and product design efforts as we work to expand our suite of enterprise applications and bring Claude to a wider audience,” Anthropic said in a release.
News of Krieger’s hiring follows Anthropic’s debut of its first enterprise offering and iOS app earlier this month.
And in March, Anthropic announced Claude 3, a suite of AI models that it says are its fastest and most powerful yet.
Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives, and its backers include Google, Salesforce and Amazon.
It’s closed five different funding deals totaling about $7.3 billion in the past year. Krieger will lead Anthropic’s latest initiatives.
