Anthropic announced on January 13th that it's expanding its Labs unit, the small team responsible for some of the company's biggest wins. Mike Krieger, who co-founded Instagram and spent two years as Anthropic's Chief Product Officer, is stepping down from the C-suite to co-lead Labs with Ben Mann, one of Anthropic's original co-founders.
Ami Vora takes over product leadership. She joined Anthropic in December 2025 after a year-long sabbatical, previously holding VP roles at WhatsApp and running product for Facebook's $130 billion ads business.
The track record that earned this bet
Labs started in mid-2024 with just two people. What came out of it:
Claude Code hit $1 billion in run-rate revenue six months after its May 2025 public launch. Netflix, Spotify, and Salesforce are among the enterprise customers. The Model Context Protocol crossed 97 million monthly SDK downloads and got donated to a Linux Foundation project in December, co-founded with OpenAI and Block. Cowork, the desktop agent that launched on January 12th, was built in about ten days. Using Claude Code.
That last detail keeps coming up. Anthropic engineer Boris Cherny confirmed that Cowork's code was written by Claude Code. The recursive loop is getting tighter.
Why a CPO wants to code again
Krieger's framing, from Anthropic's announcement: "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."
He'll report directly to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei rather than sitting in the executive hierarchy. The title downgrade is deliberate. "I want to be hands-on at the frontier," Krieger said, "building products that channel AI toward solving the world's hardest problems."
His partner Ben Mann brings different credentials. Mann was one of the architects of GPT-3 at OpenAI before co-founding Anthropic. He's been running product engineering and led the teams that shipped Claude Code and MCP. Not a consumer product guy, an AI infrastructure guy. The pairing is interesting.
The new product org
Vora's background is heavy on scale. Fifteen years at Meta, including running WhatsApp product for its 2 billion users. Most recently CPO at Faire, the wholesale marketplace. She'll work alongside CTO Rahul Patil, the former Stripe CTO who joined Anthropic in October 2025.
The split is clear: Vora handles the core Claude experience and enterprise scaling. Labs experiments at the edges.
Anthropic says it plans to double the Labs team over the next six months. No specific headcount given.
What this says about the market
Labs has essentially become Anthropic's startup-within-a-startup, and they're giving it more firepower while the rest of the organization focuses on not breaking under enterprise demand.
The company's run-rate reportedly hit $7 billion by October 2025, up from $1 billion at the start of the year. Claude Code alone accounts for a substantial chunk. When your experimental unit keeps generating billion-dollar products, you invest more in experiments.
Daniela Amodei put it plainly: "The speed of advancement in AI demands a different approach to how we build, how we organize, and where we focus. Labs gives us room to break the mold and explore."
The subtext: traditional product development cycles are too slow. Build in ten days or get lapped.
