Krieger: Selling pure API token access is a terminal failure mode
Mike Krieger · Mike Krieger, Instagram CoFounder & Anthropic CPO: Where Will Value Be Created in an AI World?|E1265 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Mar 3, 2025 · at 9:55
Mike Krieger, CPO at Anthropic, explains why foundation model companies cannot survive long term on transactional API access alone.
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“I think the more you are just, like, maybe it's good inverting that all to see, like, what the failure mode looks like. I think it is resting on your laurels or not retaining your best people. Just believing that making the models incrementally better in every branch benchmark is enough, and then treating the API as just like a way of exchanging sort of money for intelligence without figuring out how to be more of that AI partnership. If you can't do all three of those, I think you're in trouble.”
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