Mike Krieger
Chief Product Officer, Anthropic · 2 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
founderexecutiveengineer@mikeyk ↗LinkedIn ↗anthropic.com ↗Wikipedia ↗Instagram ↗
Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010 alongside Kevin Systrom, serving as its Chief Technology Officer through its acquisition by Facebook. In 2024, after co-founding the AI-powered news platform Artifact, he joined Anthropic as Chief Product Officer.
34statements → 8claims → 2claims resolved → 3.68/5average certainty → 2.03/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 32said about them ↓
2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 5 assertions · 7 opinions · 13 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Anthropic models hit 72% on SWE-bench, crushing earlier timeline predictions
“He's like, I think we'll be at 90% by the end of 20, 25 or something like that. And sure enough, we're at about 72 now with the new models and. We're at 50% when you made that prediction and it's like continued to scale pretty much like as predicted.”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Mike Krieger on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Mike Krieger said on Lenny's Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Mike Krieger estimates Claude Code is over 95% written by AI
“At this point, I would be shocked if it wasn't 95% plus.”
Anthropic's Claude Code team uses Claude to write and review itself
“The team that works in the most futuristic way is the Claude code team, because they're using Claude code to build Claude code in a very self-improving kind of way. And, you know, early on in that project, they would do very line by line pull request reviews, …”
Mike Krieger expects AI to autonomously resolve user feedback by 2025
“Hey, I'm in the discord, the, you know, the, Cloud anthropic discord. I'm in the user for I'm on X and I'm reading things and like, here's what's emergent. That's step one. Models can do that today. Step two, which the models probably can do today. We just hav…”
Mike Krieger says MCP is more promising for agents than computer use
“To really have agency and have these agentic use cases. Like one way you approach it is computer use, but computer use has a bunch of limitations. The way I get way more excited about everything is an MCP and our models are really good at using MCPs. All of a …”
Krieger: AI benchmark evals often contain flawed ground-truth answers
“And some of these model these evals we've seen, like, even the golden answer, I'm like, I'm not sure a human would say it, or, like, I think that math is actually a little wrong, like, getting a hundred percent is gonna be really hard, because even just gradin…”
Mike Krieger uses Claude Opus 4 as his primary strategy partner
“Where my go-to product strategy partner is Claude, and it has been basically for that full year where I'll write an initial strategy. I'll share it with Claude basically, and I'll have it, you know, look at it. And in the past, it's pretty anodyne kind of comm…”
Anthropic models hit 72% on SWE-bench, crushing earlier timeline predictions
“He's like, I think we'll be at 90% by the end of 20, 25 or something like that. And sure enough, we're at about 72 now with the new models and. We're at 50% when you made that prediction and it's like continued to scale pretty much like as predicted.”
Krieger: Anthropic embeds product teams directly in post-training research workflows
“The functional unit of work at Anthropic is no longer like take the model and then like go like work with design and product to go ship a product. It's more like we are at like, we're in the post-training conversations around how these things should work. And …”
Krieger: A huge overhang remains between AI capabilities and everyday adoption
“Like there's still set, we call it overhang, right? Like the Delta between what the models and the products can do and how it's been, they're being used on a daily basis, huge overhang. So that's, we're still like a very, very strong necessary role for product…”
Krieger: Major strategy and product pivots are extremely difficult for remote teams
“And I think there were like major shifts that we would have wanted to make it both in the strategy and the product and the team. And it's really hard to do that. If you are all fully remote, like nothing replaces like the Instagram days”
Mike Krieger steered Anthropic's product strategy toward APIs over consumer apps
“I came in, everybody expected me to just like go super, super hard on consumer and make that the thing. And I again would make the other mistake. Instead, I spent a bunch of time talking to like financial services companies and insurance companies and like oth…”
Mike Krieger confirms Anthropic is not planning to acquire Cursor
“I don't think we're gonna buy a cursor.
Cursor's very big but we love working with them.”
The best AI startups intentionally build at the edge of model failure
“I think being willing to build more at the edge of the capabilities and basically break the model and then be surprised by the next model.”
Optimizing AI models for likability risks creating sycophancy, says Mike Krieger
“It would be very dangerous to over optimize on like Claude's likability, you know, because you can fall into things like, you know, is Claude gonna be sycophantic? Is Claude gonna tell you what you hear? Is Claude going to like prolong conversations just for p…”
Mike Krieger says AI products should measure task completion, not engagement
“I don't have a great answer yet, but I think that like, it's not the web two O or even the social media days, like engagement metrics, you know, it should hopefully really be around Like, did it actually help you get your work done?”
Krieger: Delegating all cognition to AI short-circuits independent thought
“Not just sort of delegating all of your cognition to the, you know, to the AI, cuz they won't always get it right. And also kind of like, you know, kind of short circuits, any kind of independent thought.”
Krieger: Structuring AI code prompts remains a specialized engineering skill
“What I've learned though, is like the process of knowing what to ask the AI, how to compose the question, how to even think about like structuring a change between the backend and the front end. Those are still very difficult and specialized skills, and they s…”
Anthropic rebuilt its merge queue because AI generated too much code
“We really rapidly became bottlenecked on other things like our merge queue, which is the sort of sort of get in line to get your change accepted by you know, the system that then deploys it to production. We had to completely re architect it because so much mo…”
Mike Krieger expects software shipping workflows to drastically change by mid-2026
“I would expect that like a year from now, the way that we are like conceiving of building and shipping software just changes a lot because it's gonna be very painful to do it the current way.”
Krieger: Context flow limits autonomous AI workflows more than reasoning capability
“We're limited more around like making sure the context flows through all of that. So we have the right access to those things more than the model's capability to reason and propose.”
Krieger: Claude is a very good prompter of itself
“Watch our prompt improver and then note that like Claude itself is a very good prompter of Claude.”
Krieger: News apps struggle to achieve the organic virality of photo networks
“Instagram spread in the early days because people would take photos and then post them on other networks and tell friends about it. And there was like this really natural, like, how did you do that? I want to do it. News was very personal. Like I can't tell me…”
Krieger: Without market momentum, startups get one unit of output per ten inputs
“This concurrent incarnation we love, but it's like not growing. Like the way I put it, it's like 10 units of input in for one unit of output versus the other way around. Like if we like put blood, sweat and tears into the product and like Launch something we w…”
The other half of the tape: Mike Krieger's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 29 times in 13 episodes on Lenny's Podcast. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Lenny Rachitsky 17Peter Deng 6Bangaly Kaba 4Gina Gotthilf 1Ami Vora 1
Statements about Mike Krieger, by other people (3)
Rachitsky: Anthropic CPO claimed Dario Amodei's past predictions were all accurate
“I actually had Mike on the podcast, their CPO, Mike Krieger, and he pointed out that Dario, every prediction he's had so far has been right over the past few years.”
Deng: Indecision harms startups more than being wrong with conviction
“Having a strong point of view is really important because like, you know, there's a saying that Mike and Kevin had it at Instagram, which is we may not be right, but at least we're not confused. I think that just, it was, it's a beautiful phrase. I thought, be…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2025 22 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products
- Why ChatGPT will be the next big growth channel (and how to capitalize on it) | Brian Balfour
- The $1B Al company training ChatGPT, Claude & Gemini on the path to responsible AGI | Edwin Chen
- From managing people to managing AI: The leadership skills everyone needs now | Julie Zhuo
- Inside ChatGPT: The fastest growing product in history | Nick Turley (OpenAI)
- Anthropic co-founder: AGI predictions, leaving OpenAI, what keeps him up at night | Ben Mann
- I’ve run 75+ businesses. Here’s why you’re probably chasing the wrong idea. | Andrew Wilkinson
- AI prompt engineering in 2025: What works and what doesn’t | Sander Schulhoff
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 6 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic's CPO on what comes next | Mike Krieger (co-founder of Instagram) | Jun 5, 2025 | 46m |
| A conversation with OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil, Anthropic's CPO Mike Krieger, and Sarah Guo | Nov 6, 2024 | 15m |