Anthropic's Labs Lead On Fable's Capabilities + Building AI-Native Products — With Mike Krieger

A straightforward thing, but it is how we're trying to navigate what is admittedly a complicated sort of situation.

Startup.

Right. Right. Financials have changed quite a bit since then. And yet, Anthropic has positioned itself—it is, you know, a PBC and it's positioned itself as sort of a more ethical company around building AI. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you see that positioning and Anthropic's role in particular changing the culture of the valley. Like I know I think back to how Google in the beginning of the 2000s really changed the culture of Silicon Valley in so many ways. And how do you see Anthropic's culture now dictating this next era?

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. Maybe I'll start like inside and I think there's an external component too. I think the reason I joined in the first place—so I was winding down my second startup and knew I wanted to go work at a frontier lab because I'd started to use these models for coding and they were bad at coding but I could see that they were as bad as they were ever going to be at coding. They were going to improve. And I had started building on top of these APIs. So the startup I was doing was called Artifact and we did sort of AI-powered news recommendations and I actually read a lot of big tech via Artifact back in the day. That's one of the things we added.

Not Wired. You know, you guys had a really hard paywall to be honest.

It's actually really funny like the making deals—

It's the login cookies. It's actually really hard to keep people, you know, so—

Email login is very hard to do in an app. But so, but I was building on top of the APIs and be like, "Wow, okay, they're able to do really interesting things." But what ultimately made me go to Anthropic was like they walked the walk and they really deeply believe in trying to make AI go well for humanity. And that's like in the water internally and I think has been why the company has remained as cohesive as it has even as we've grown. And I think that it's like a testament also to the co-founders there on how often they are talking about this as well. It was a surprise for me coming from a world where at Instagram we did a weekly all-hands and we talked about product 95% of the time and maybe 5% of the time we talked about something else that was going on in the world around the company. Probably maybe underselling our go-to-market. Maybe it was like 80/20, but it was definitely very, very heavy product. And I remember about six months in, myself and Kate Jensen who's one of the leaders in the sales organization did a joint all-hands where we talked about how we're doing product and go-to-market together. And people are like, "This is so great. I finally understand our product strategy and what we've been doing." It's like, "Oh, right. This is not quote-unquote a product company, you know. It is a very mission-driven AI company with a very strong sense of why it exists in the world." I think in terms of the overall impact on the valley, it remains to be seen. I think positive signs that I've seen or interesting signs that I've seen are like a renewed interest in philanthropy across the board and I think that's something that has been written about and I think it will be an interesting sort of outflow. Again, who knows how all of this goes, but depending on how it goes, it could mean a lot of interesting new philanthropic deployment. And then I think the other piece is, you know, the conversation around how AI could or should go is one that is happening in real time with the technology versus retrospectively, which I think has been the case for other technology waves and I think that is a good thing.

You have 13 minutes left. Go.

I think maybe two themes I'm really excited about that we've been exploring a lot. The first one is giving Claude an environment where it has more agency and it also has more self-knowledge. And I'm going to unpack that because that's like a lot of AI words. I'll give you an example of where we are currently doing a bad job of this. Like, if you are in a Claude project and you make a file with Claude, you're like, "That's great. Can you add it to our project?" Claude will be "No. You have to go download the file and go drag and drop into this thing." And you're like, "What?" Until yesterday, I would have said the same thing about Claude Design and Claude Code where you're in Claude Code, you're like, "Cool, I need a design for this thing that we're building." Or you're in Claude Design and you make a mock-up and you want to go build it, be like, "Cool. Here's a zip file." And you're like, "What?" You know, and I think so that's a little bit of interoperability, but in general, this theme of giving—if you give Claude a lot of notion of its environment—I was talking to actually a customer, like an API customer, and one of the things that they were experimenting with is actually even giving Claude like a secure version of their source code while it's running in the agent loop in their product so that if it hits an issue it doesn't go like "I don't know, I hit an issue"—it can be like "well it's probably this thing" at least when it's talking to one of the maintainers of the software. And so that overall theme—and of course you have to do it with safeguards and be really careful about what you unlock with it. It sounds kind of obvious but it's actually night and day in terms of how expressive these products end up being able to be. And you can even see it going from like maybe core chat or classic chat in Claude AI and something like Co-Work where it's got a little bit more agency and it has a runtime and it's able to sort of understand a little bit about its environment. But I think we are at like 10% of the journey about where we could go. Actually one of the reasons I think people got excited about things like Open Claude is seeing how a harness that is modifiable and you can talk to it about things and you don't ever get the sense of like "oh sorry I can't do that, you're going to have to go to this settings screen and turn it on"—it's just a thing it has access to and hopefully with the right guarding and permissions. So that's like theme one that I'm like extremely excited about and I think if we do it right should actually transform all of our products from head to toe.

The other piece is—and I'll maybe share if not the internal product we're working on but like the phrase I got out of feedback was—I think closing the gap—I mean I talked about closing the gap between capabilities and reality—I think it's also closing the gap between how people understand their own work and then how the actual day-to-day is to do that work. I was talking to somebody internally who's on our privacy team and to move a ticket from like one queue through another one via the task tracker into another one was like eight different steps of copy and pasting of manually moving a pretty, you know, kind of annoying to have to do. Probably error-prone. I have to keep spot checking it. And we helped her with one of our Labs projects to basically make that not a pain. And she's like, "Ah, this is the first time in my career"—and she's been working for 30 years—"what's in my head and what I am using is like now this. It is now closed." And I want to bring that feeling to everybody who, you know, of course Claude unlocked a lot of non-technical people being able to code. But we're still asking people to understand way too many concepts of what is—the difference between like my sandbox environment and production or connected MCP as myself or others or how should I store data? And of course you can't abstract everything, but if you combine both of those themes, if you give Claude a lot of self-knowledge and you're creating an environment where you can actually solve complex problems for people in repeatable ways, I think I get very, very excited about that.

Yeah.

Moonshot?

No nothing in space. Although I guess we're, you know, we're talking to SpaceX about spacey things.