Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden

**Angela Jiang** (0:00)
The last layer of abstraction on top of this is probably the coordination layer. So you have knowledge, and you have execution, and you have coordination. And at the coordination layer, we're beginning to think of these things called strategies, where basically, it's almost like a meta-harness. The true low-level harness is designed for execution. But the next one is about, okay, if tokens aren't really fungible, and you need to give them different jobs, like maybe this token is advising versus this token is executing, you wanna start composing these kind of orchestrated strategies that go together, and they should sit on top of all these things, because at the end of the day, we still need to execute, and the execution still needs to know what to do, so everything in theory should kind of like ladder together, and so I think, you know, if you were to look at our roadmap and maybe kind of project forward a little bit where you kind of expect this to go, we'll move more and more from the knowledge layer to the execution layer, from the execution layer to the kind of coordination layer in terms of the abstractions that you can see us put out.

**Sonya Huang** (1:04)
Katelyn and Angela, thank you so much for joining us today. Lauren and I are thrilled to have you here. You are responsible for building Anthropic's platform. And so you are responsible for building what I think is one of the most important, if not the most important, developer platform in the world. And we are really excited to interview you today to understand more about what's ahead. And so maybe just to get started, can you give us the context of, what is Anthropic platform and where do you sit within Anthropic?

**Katelyn Lesse** (1:28)
Yeah, so platform is both our externally facing APIs, our developer platform that people build on top of and they want to build applications and systems that access Claude's intelligence, as well as internally, we run our product infrastructure and basically we're the layer that our apps build on top of internally as well.

**Sonya Huang** (1:49)
Awesome. What's your North Star as a team?

**Angela Jiang** (1:50)
It's a great question. We actually, because we have both internal and external, we actually have two North Stars, which is probably like, you'd be like, what? You should only be one North Star. But-

**Sonya Huang** (2:00)
We're a different planetary system.

**Angela Jiang** (2:01)
Yes, exactly. They're separate solar systems, so it's fine. But on the internal side, we really want to provide literally as much leverage as possible for our internal teams to be able to ship AGI-pilled products.
We want them to be able to move fast, we want to have reliable, great platform to be able to build on top of. But I think that key bit about speed is really intentional for us, and we really, really care about that internally. Externally, we actually have a lot more complicated set of things. But one of the true norths that we have there is to be able to basically give any builder the tools to be able to work with Claude, to build whatever they want to build. It's a bit of a broad statement, but as a result, that boils itself down into being wherever that business is. We really care about bringing our platform really, really close to that business. This is why we spend a lot of time with the hyperscalers, integrating really closely directly with them like AWS, Google, and so on and so forth.
It is a lot of primitives that we end up creating. We want people to be able to express what they think their product should be. We want them to be able to almost do custom software in their own way. In this new world with AI, what used to be probably economically impossible was that last mile of custom software now in theory should be very, very achievable. We want to give them all the tools and all the capabilities to go and do that. Sometimes that comes in the form of primitives and APIs and higher-order abstractions, and sometimes that comes in the form of just like standards. So for example, like skills and MCP, those are things just like Claude needs them to be useful. And we can just give them out to the rest of the ecosystem, work with everyone to help you create those things and get the best out of Claude. So I would say externally, you know, we really are oriented around just helping you just be able to build, but internally, that orientation while still existing is probably more, you know, specified towards speed and being able to move really quickly.