Opening article
Anthropic announced the launch of its new Labs team on January 13, 2026, aimed at incubating experimental products built on Claude’s frontier capabilities. The team will be led by Mike Krieger, former Instagram co‑founder and Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer, alongside Ben Mann, with Ami Vora heading the product organization and Rahul Patil as CTO. Labs will focus on rapid experimentation, testing unpolished versions with early users, and scaling successful prototypes into reliable products. The company also highlighted its safety efforts, including collaboration with METR and discussions with Hugging Face, and noted its Singapore office and MOU for responsible AI adoption.
Our models are evolving at a rapid clip, and each new release brings another leap in capabilities. Building product experiences around these emerging capabilities requires different motions working in partnership: tinkering and experimenting at the edge of what Claude can do, testing unpolished versions with early users to find what works, and taking what lands and scaling it into products our customers can rely on.
This approach has produced Claude Code, which grew from a research preview to a billion-dollar product in six months; the Model Context Protocol (MCP) which, at 100M monthly downloads , has become the industry standard for connecting AI to tools and data; Skills , Claude in Chrome , and Cowork , which launched as a research preview yesterday to bring Claude’s agentic capabilities to desktop.
Today we’re building on this approach with the expansion of Labs, a team focused on incubating experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities. Mike Krieger—who co-founded Instagram and has spent the past two years as Anthropic’s Chief Product Officer—is joining Labs to build alongside Ben Mann. Ami Vora—who joined Anthropic at the end of 2025—will lead the Product organization, partnering closely with Rahul Patil, our CTO, to scale the Claude experiences that millions of users rely on every day.
“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,” said Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic. “We now have the right structure in place to support the most critical motions for our product organization—discovering experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities, and scaling them responsibly to meet the needs of our enterprise customers and growing user base.”
We're hiring builders with a track record of creating products people love and shaping emerging technology with care. If you’d like to build with us at the very frontier of AI capabilities, we want to hear from you .
To evaluate the safety of our systems, Anthropic is giving employee-like access to a team from METR, a nonprofit that evaluates frontier AI models, and we're in early discussions with several other organizations, including Hugging Face.
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The creation of a dedicated Labs team signals Anthropic’s commitment to rapid innovation while maintaining safety and scalability, setting a model for other AI firms to balance experimentation with responsible deployment.