How AI Starts Doing the Work in 2026 With Anthropic CPO Mike Krieger

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (0:00)
Today on the AI Daily Brief, the future of vibe coding and what's in store with AI 2026 with Mike Krieger, the Chief Product Officer of Anthropic. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI.
All right, friends, quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, Super Intelligent, Robots and Pencils and Blitzi. To get an ad-free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. To learn more about sponsoring the show, send us a note at sponsors at aidbbrief.ai. And if you are interested in our forthcoming AI DB intelligence service, check it out at aidbintel.com. Now as we move forward into our end of year episodes, I'm excited to add a couple of conversations into the mix. You might know Mike Krieger as the co-founder of Instagram. Real Ones will also know him as the co-founder of Artifact, an AI powered news app. However, for most of you right now, Mike's most important role is as the chief product officer of Anthropic. In this conversation, we talk about the origins of Anthropic's focus on coding, how enterprise AI usage has changed over the course of the year, and some of the trends that Mike is most excited about heading into 2026 All right, Mike, welcome to the AI Daily Brief. Great to have you here.

**Mike Krieger** (1:17)
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (1:18)
Yeah. So this is super fun. Like I was just saying, some of my favorite episodes of the year are these end of year episodes where we get to kind of think think big, look forward. And one of the big themes, I think, for me, heading into the new year is sort of everything, vibe coding, everything agentic. And so I was super excited to have you join the show. What I wanted to do though, is actually kind of go go way back a little bit. I think, you know, a lot of folks see Anthropic as sort of the torchbearer in a lot of ways for AI coding. And I wondered, you know, I was thinking about when you join the organization and just how early was that sort of focus clear? You know, was that an emergent phenomenon as it became clear that there was something very differentiated in these models? And that's how people were using it? Or is that sort of like intention from very early on? That this is a broad sort of set of use cases that matter to you guys?

**Mike Krieger** (2:05)
Yeah, the thing I always like to say whenever there's sort of product folks inside Anthropic, they're thinking about sort of which direction to take things in is the more you can align with the sort of company's general long term perspective about where powerful AI will come from, like the smoother things will go because Anthropic is nothing but focused, right? And I think that that's shown through in sort of the best that we choose to make versus not. And definitely there's this belief that for very powerful AI, you need the ability of the model to reason about things, to plan agentically and work for a long time horizon, but then also to be able to write and run code, not only to produce software but because it's a really useful tool for solving problems. And so that belief was in there and it predates me, I joined in May of last year.
But it coincided with the outside world realizing it because Claude 3, which had come out I think a month before that, was the first model and I remember there was that moment on Twitter where we said, oh, wow, this model can actually write not just function level, but entire files of code. And of course, compared to now, it was not very good. It was already amazing what it could do then. And then we paired it with our first more coding oriented product, which was artifacts. So you could have Claude generate, you know, at the time was mostly React sites, you know, alongside the chat. And that was kind of, I think, for a lot of people, the first moment they realized, oh, this is an interesting new experience of kind of coding alongside the model and not necessarily doing it in a development environment.

**Nathaniel Whittemore** (3:28)
Yeah, it's interesting. I think you can in a lot of ways almost chart people's sort of the viability of a lot of this to key releases alongside Anthropic. You know, I remember when I first started this show, it was actually April of 2023 And already sort of agentic coding was like the thing that people were most excited about, like GPT engineer, which would later actually become sort of morph into lovable at like 18 months later or something like that. Was it was like my first viral YouTube episode was about GPT engineer. And so it's interesting to see kind of like at each stage, how more use cases get unlocked and sort of a broader set of people come into the fold.