Inside Anthropic’s search for the next Claude Code

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You're never gonna be able to fully replicate the feeling of two or three of us against the world. We have X amount of dollars, and if we don't manage to make something work, we're gonna have to go wind it down, return the money to investors, you know?

That's like you and Kevin back in the day.

Exactly.

What's Anthropic's next big product after Claude Code? This week on the show we've got Mike Krieger, the co-founder of Instagram, who now leads the team at Anthropic working on its moonshot bets [laughs].

One of the, the dark days of my Anthropic tenure [laughs] was naming it 3.5v2, and I can tell you why we ended up that way.

Mike and I recorded this conversation in person on the sidelines of Anthropic's recent Claude Code Conference in San Francisco, where the company announced a big, new compute deal with Elon Musk. Hence you guys apparently going to space with Elon [laughs].

Space. Exactly, right. Yeah, and finding new sources of, unexpected sources of compute.

We get into what Mike is working on now, Anthropic's fierce competition with OpenAI, and the human work that Mike thinks will continue to matter even as AI gets better and better. This is Access. [instrumental music] Mike, it's good to see you here at Claude Code in SF. Uh, I was thinking back to our last conversation, and you were more recent in your lab's tenure, but it's been a, what, few months now?

Yeah, it's been almost four months now.

Four, almost four months now. For people who don't understand Labs, I'd actually like to start there 'cause it's a pretty unique setup. We were talking about it, uh, when I was at the office a, a couple months ago. What is it? What is the mission of, of Labs in Anthropic?

Yeah. In a nutshell, the way I think about Labs, and Labs, this-- I would call this Labs V2, and we can go into what Labs V1 sort of did and, and, and what Labs V2 is meant to do, but, um, I think of it as doing two things. One is closing the gap between what Claude is theoretically capable of and how that actually shows up for people in their kind of everyday lives, right? So what products or prototypes or projects do we build that sort of illustrate how you could unlock more of that sort of potential, like close more of that, of that gap. We can unpack what that means. And the second piece is we're the sort of advanced scouts figuring out where the model is gonna need to go in