Anthropic’s CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram)

Posted on June 5, 2025

TL;DR Summary of Mike Krieger on AI-Driven Product Innovation at Anthropic

Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s CPO and Instagram co-founder, reveals how AI writes 90-95% of their product code, shifting bottlenecks to decision-making rather than engineering. Embedding product managers with AI researchers delivers 10x more impact, while Anthropic focuses on developer-centric, agentic AI tools to compete long-term with OpenAI. Their Model Context Protocol (MCP) is reshaping software by making all digital interactions composable by AI agents, emphasizing independent thought alongside AI use. Key takeaways include new product metrics focused on value delivered and startup strategies to thrive amid AI giants.

Optimixed’s Overview: How Anthropic is Revolutionizing AI Product Development and Strategy

Transforming Product Development with AI-Generated Code

Mike Krieger explains that Anthropic now relies on AI to write the vast majority of its code, dramatically accelerating product development. This evolution changes the primary challenges from coding to strategic decision-making and efficiently merging code into production pipelines. Most companies are expected to reach this AI-driven development milestone within a year.

Embedding Product Teams with AI Research for Maximum Impact

  • Close collaboration between product managers and AI researchers results in exponentially higher innovation.
  • Anthropic emphasizes post-training fine-tuning and deep integration rather than simply building on public AI APIs.
  • This approach leads to truly differentiated products that leverage Anthropic’s unique strengths in coding and agentic AI behavior.

The Model Context Protocol (MCP): A New Software Paradigm

MCP is Anthropic’s groundbreaking standard that enables AI agents to script and compose all digital interactions, potentially becoming the fastest-growing protocol in tech history. With major integrations like Microsoft Windows adopting MCP, this could fundamentally transform software architecture and user interaction models.

Product Strategy and AI’s Future

  • Claude Opus 4, Anthropic’s AI, now acts as a genuine strategic thought partner, offering novel insights beyond the obvious.
  • Mike advises startups to focus on deep domain expertise, unique go-to-market strategies, and new interaction paradigms to compete with AI giants.
  • Value delivered, such as rapid prototyping efficiency, is a more meaningful product metric than traditional engagement numbers.

Lessons from Artifact and Maintaining Human Cognition

Despite loving the AI-powered news app Artifact, Mike decided to shut it down due to market challenges, highlighting the importance of knowing when to pivot or quit. Additionally, he stresses teaching curiosity and independent thinking alongside AI use to ensure humans remain critical evaluators of AI-generated information.

Source: Lenny’s Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky. Read original article.