Anthropic's Labs Lead On Fable's Capabilities + Building AI-Native Products — With Mike Krieger

**Alex Kantrowitz** (0:00)
Anthropic is not just a massive model builder, it's a massive product builder as well, with products like Cloud Code and Cowork that have taken off like crazy over the past few months. And Cloud Code came out of a place that few of us know much about called Anthropic Labs. And Anthropic Labs is a organization within Anthropic that is working on building the next level of frontier products with AI at the center. And so today, we are lucky to hear the person running that lab, Mike Krieger, who is the co-founder of Instagram and now the lead of Anthropic Labs at Anthropic. We're going to welcome him on stage along with Lauren Goode of Wired, who will join me as a co-interview. Mike and Lauren, let's hear it for both of you guys.
Let me see it, let me see it. You're here, right.
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**Lauren Goode** (1:25)
All right.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:26)
All right, Mike, so chill times in Anthropic land.

**Mike Krieger** (1:28)
Nothing going on.

**Lauren Goode** (1:30)
Slow week.

**Mike Krieger** (1:30)
Slow week.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (1:33)
You want to start, Lauren?

**Lauren Goode** (1:34)
Yeah.
First of all, I mean, we want to talk about what you're working on at Labs and explain your role to folks. But I want to ask you first, how close are you right now to the situation with the White House?

**Mike Krieger** (1:46)
Less than in my CPO role. So I transitioned about five months ago into this Labs role. I think in the CPO role, I think would have been deep in it. Now I'm more, obviously, we want to restore it, and as a product person, I want to make sure that that gets access. But less close to it than in that sort of C-level role that I had before.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:06)
Okay.

**Lauren Goode** (2:07)
Alex, do you have a follow-up? I have like eight follow-ups.

**Alex Kantrowitz** (2:09)
Definitely. Well, there was a guy named Ben on X who said, I will mail Anthropic an original copy of my long-form birth certificate if they will enable Fable for me again.
I sound like those lunatics who were obsessed with 4 now. Will you take Ben's long-form?

**Mike Krieger** (2:23)
I don't know that we'll take his long-form, but it has been interesting. I mean, Fable was only available for a few days, but I've definitely, every time I've tweeted since then, they have not read whatever I was tweeting, and they've mostly been like, bring back Fable, which like, in Instagram, we got rid of Gotham. Do you ever Gotham the filter? This is like, and then for the rest, like the next eight years, all I heard was bring back Gotham. So it struck a nerve, but Fable will come back before Gotham did. But yeah, it's clearly the folks that have gotten to use it and started incorporating it. It's actually really interesting.
I've learned to not really trust day of or even week of model reactions. You don't really know until you've put it through its paces. And so, like I almost just completely block out the noise in the first couple of days of any new model release. Cause I don't know, everybody has maybe their like toy, like example thing that they like to do with a new model, but it's hard to actually put it through its paces until you've actually had real work done with it. And I think people were just starting to do that. And then, you know, we had to sort of pull back Fable. But I remember in December, when we put out Opus 4-6, it was like this interesting time where everybody went home for the holidays and a lot of people had that week off between Christmas and New Year's. And then they came back and were like, oh, I spent a lot of time and I really get why Opus is good and I'm gonna do it. So I don't think Fable has had that opportunity yet.

**Lauren Goode** (3:41)
But despite that though, I mean, this was a pretty big reaction from the Trump administration. And I think everyone here, especially if you were listening to the Alex Stamos session, understands what's going on. But this happened within a few days of the model release.
If I can give Wired some credit, Wired just reported last night that it was due to Anthropix relationship with or having giving access to the model to SK Telecom that could have raised flags within the administration. How surprised were you by how immediate that backlash was?