Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesn’t plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. “I hope Claude reaches as many […]
Anthropic is one of the world’s leading AI model providers, especially in areas like coding. But its AI assistant, Claude, is nowhere near as popular as OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
According to chief product officer Mike Krieger, Anthropic doesn’t plan to win the AI race by building a mainstream AI assistant. “I hope Claude reaches as many people as possible,†Krieger told me onstage at the HumanX AI conference earlier this week. “But I think, [for] our ambitions, the critical path isn’t through mass-market consumer adoption right now.â€
Instead, Krieger says Anthropic is focused on two things: building the best models; and what he calls “vertical experiences that unlock agents.†The first of these is Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding tool that Krieger says amassed 100,000 users within its first week of availability. He says there are more of these so-called agents for specific use cases coming this year and that Anthropic is working on “smaller, cheaper models†for developers. (And, yes, there are future versions of its biggest and most capable model, Opus, coming at some point, too.)
Krieger made his name as the cofounder of Instagram and then the news aggregati …