Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next

Mike Krieger, co-founder of Instagram and chief product officer at Anthropic (maker of Claude), discusses how AI is changing product development, from code being largely AI-written to new bottlenecks in decision-making, review, and merging. The conversation also covers Anthropic's product strategy versus competitors like ChatGPT, the rise of MCP, the reasons behind shutting down his startup Artifact, and his views on raising kids in an AI-shaped world.

01Key learnings

• Use AI as an independent strategy critic: ask it to be brutal or to challenge your thinking, since default prompts tend to produce polite, shallow feedback.
• As AI writes most code, bottlenecks shift upstream to deciding what to build and aligning people, and downstream to merge queues, review, and launch coordination.
• Give teams a minimum viable strategy so people feel empowered to build and explore at the edge of model capabilities without waiting for perfect alignment.
• Embed product people directly with model researchers and post-training teams; Mike found this produces far more leverage than handing finished models to product later.
• Differentiate by leaning into what you're uniquely good at, such as builder and developer audiences, rather than chasing consumer hits head-on.
• For AI startups seeking defensible ground, pursue deep industry-specific workflows, a precise understanding of the buyer persona, and novel interaction forms that incumbents struggle to adopt.
• Expose product primitives through MCP so models can read and write to them agentically, turning features into composable, scriptable capabilities.
• Teach kids to question and verify rather than delegate all thinking to AI, nurturing curiosity and the scientific process of inquiry.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.