Who Is Mike Krieger? Instagram Co-Founder and Anthropic Labs Leader

Mike Krieger is the co-founder and former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Instagram who works at Anthropic in its experimental product incubator, Anthropic Labs.

Krieger served as Anthropic's Chief Product Officer (CPO) from May 2024 until January 2026, when he transitioned to Labs to build experimental artificial intelligence (AI) software alongside Ben Mann.

Before joining Anthropic, he co-founded the personalized news application Artifact. He built the COVID-19 tracking website Rt.live. He also spent eight years scaling Instagram from its 2010 founding to more than 1 billion users.

What Mike Krieger Does Now

Mike Krieger works at Anthropic in its experimental product incubator, Anthropic Labs, after moving out of the Chief Product Officer (CPO) role in January 2026.

On January 13, 2026, Anthropic announced that Krieger, who spent the past two years as Anthropic's Chief Product Officer, moved into Anthropic Labs to build alongside Ben Mann. Publications reported differing descriptions of his exact organizational title during this transition. Storyboard18 reported that Krieger co-leads Anthropic Labs with Ben Mann and reports to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei, citing "media reports." The Information's headline read "Anthropic Moves Chief Product Officer Krieger to Labs Group."

As Anthropic stated in its January 2026 announcement, Ami Vora took over leadership of the Product organization, coordinating operations with Chief Technology Officer Rahul Patil. In an April 16, 2026 article covering his departure from Figma's board, TechCrunch continued to refer to Krieger as Chief Product Officer. Anthropic's own January 13 post was the primary source. It had already placed him in Labs. On September 29, 2026, Reuters reported on Anthropic's initial public offering (IPO) prospectus. Reuters' factbox of key executives named in the prospectus lists Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei. The factbox does not list Krieger.

• Current role: Incubator builder and co-lead at Anthropic Labs alongside Ben Mann
• Current organization: Anthropic (Storyboard18 reports he reports to President Daniela Amodei)
• Known for: Co-founding Instagram and serving as its Chief Technology Officer from 2010 to 2018
• Recent news: Moving from Anthropic Chief Product Officer to Anthropic Labs in January 2026 and stepping down from the Figma board of directors in April 2026

Anthropic Labs and Experimental Product Incubation

Anthropic describes Labs as "a team focused on incubating experimental products at the frontier of Claude's capabilities."

In the Anthropic Labs launch announcement, President Daniela Amodei stated that the pace of advancement in artificial intelligence requires a different approach to organizing teams, building tools, and selecting project priorities. Anthropic cited software experiments such as Claude Code, Model Context Protocol (MCP), Skills, Claude in Chrome, and Cowork as examples of the incubator's exploration model. The post does not say Krieger built any of them.

On April 17, 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude Design as an experimental product from Anthropic Labs, making it available as a research preview to Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise subscribers. The software allows users to collaborate with Claude to create polished visual work. The launch post does not name Krieger. Anthropic has not published which Labs products he leads. Storyboard18, citing media reports, said in January 2026 that Labs launched in mid-2024 and planned to double its headcount within six months.

Figma Board Tenure and Corporate Governance

Mike Krieger resigned from Figma's board of directors on April 14, 2026. According to TechCrunch, Figma submitted a regulatory filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on April 14, 2026, disclosing Krieger's departure.

Krieger had served on Figma's board for less than a year prior to the resignation. His departure followed reporting from The Information. That reporting indicated that Anthropic's next model, Opus 4.7, would include design tools that could compete with Figma's main product.

Alex Heath's May 15, 2026 interview with Krieger on Sources was billed as covering "his focus on AI and health, unifying Claude Code and Cowork, and his drama with Figma." The interview itself is paywalled.

Chief Product Officer Tenure at Anthropic

Anthropic announced on May 15, 2024, that it had hired Mike Krieger as its first Chief Product Officer (CPO) to lead product engineering, product management and product design.

Anthropic announced that Krieger joined the leadership team to guide enterprise application expansion and broaden the reach of the Claude model family. At his appointment, TechCrunch reported his responsibilities. They encompassed enterprise services, commercial subscription software, and consumer applications including the Claude mobile app. In Anthropic's announcement, Krieger said: "I've long admired Anthropic's relentless focus on building capable and trustworthy AI systems that empower humans."

Anthropic Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei commended the appointment. He called Krieger a world-class engineer, builder, and leader.

Artifact News Application and the Yahoo Acquisition

Before joining Anthropic, Mike Krieger co-founded Artifact, a personalized news reading application that launched in January 2023 and sold its technology to Yahoo in April 2024.

Krieger developed the service alongside Kevin Systrom, spending approximately three years building Artifact before Yahoo acquired it. On January 12, 2024, TechCrunch reported that Artifact planned to wind down operations. Artifact determined that the commercial market opportunity was not large enough to justify ongoing capital investment. Systrom wrote that "making the tough call earlier is better for everyone involved." Core news reading continued through the end of February 2024.

On April 2, 2024, TechCrunch confirmed that Yahoo acquired Artifact under undisclosed financial terms. Under the purchase agreement, Artifact ceased operations as an independent mobile application, and Yahoo integrated Artifact's personalization tech into products including Yahoo News. Krieger and Systrom stayed in an "advisory capacity." TechCrunch reported that Krieger's advisory work for Yahoo had ended by the time Anthropic hired him in May 2024.

The Rt.live COVID-19 Tracking Project

In April 2020, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom launched Rt.live, a state-by-state tracker of how COVID-19 was spreading.

As reported by TechCrunch, Rt.live was their first project together since leaving Facebook. The website tracked each state's effective reproduction number, designated as Rt. That number measured the effective infection rate. Systrom did the data analysis, while Krieger built the site.

Krieger explained at launch that the founders built Rt.live because they believed Rt, the effective infection rate, was one of the best ways to understand how COVID is spreading.

How Instagram Grew and Sold to Facebook

Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010 alongside Kevin Systrom and served as its Chief Technology Officer (CTO) until 2018.

According to Instagram's official product timeline, Instagram launched on October 6, 2010. User registration then expanded rapidly. It reached 1 million registered accounts by December 2010. By September 2011, it reached 10 million. The Stanford Daily recounted the origin. Through his work on a check-in app, Krieger noticed that people enjoyed sharing photos. Systrom's filter idea came from a trip to Mexico, and the two combined the ideas into a photo-sharing app.

On April 9, 2012, Facebook agreed to acquire Instagram for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock, as reported by TechCrunch. At the time of the agreement, Instagram operated with 27 million registered iOS users. In 2018, TechCrunch gave the price as $715 million. That reflects the deal's value at closing rather than the roughly $1 billion announced in 2012. According to Anthropic, Krieger as CTO grew Instagram's engineering team to more than 450 people. He helped the platform reach over a billion users. On September 24, 2018, Systrom and Krieger told the company they were resigning, TechCrunch reported. Their statement said, "We're planning on taking some time off to explore our curiosity and creativity again." TechCrunch's sources tied the exit to tension over Instagram's autonomy from Facebook.

Stanford Academic Background and Symbolic Systems Studies

Mike Krieger earned undergraduate and graduate degrees from Stanford University, where he studied human-computer interaction and symbolic systems.

According to the Stanford Daily, Krieger completed his undergraduate studies in the class of 2008 and earned a Master of Science (M.S.) degree in 2009. He told the Stanford Daily that he heard about "this thing called Symbolic Systems (SymSys)" on arriving. He "took basically every human-interaction class designed here." The paper does not give his exact degree names. He stayed on for Stanford's Mayfield Fellows entrepreneurship program, where he first met future Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom.

Estimates of Krieger's personal net worth are not reliably published.