Anthropic create an incubator lab

In January, Anthropic (Claude) announced the opening of their incubator lab 'a team focused on incubating experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities.'

The lab has been joined by their Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger (who co-founded Instagram), along with Ben Mann an Anthropic co-founder, who previously worked at OpenAI.

“The speed of advancement in AI demands a different approach to how we build, how we organize, and where we focus. Labs gives us room to break the mold and explore,” said Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic. “We now have the right structure in place to support the most critical motions for our product organization—discovering experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities, and scaling them responsibly to meet the needs of our enterprise customers and growing user base.”

Organisations typically invest in Incubator labs when they feel that their organisation is stifling the creativity and break-out thinking that will be needed for their success.

At just four years old, with around 2,500 employees, Anthropic is still pretty young. Its $350 billion valuation in 2025 was primarily driven by significant investments from major firms like Microsoft and Nvidia, who will have big expectations for a return on their investment.

With the delivery of Claude, which rates highly in GDPval tests, Claude Code, and Claude CoWork, their progress has been stellar in the lsat year.

So what can we expect from their incubator … we will need to wait and see.

See more: https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-anthropic-labs

BESCI AI OPINION
Incubator Labs can be a powerful way to unharness your talent and create break-out projects, unencumbered by the processes, policies and politics of your main organisation, which has a 'day job' to deliver.

They are most effective when empowered to do their job well and when they have the conviction of those who lead the organisation and who will smooth the path of any innovations into the organisation, into a new organisation to grow them, or sell them.

It is interesting that Anthropic feel the need to ringfence at this stage in their development, which may signal the growing pains in the organisation as more corporates rely on Claude, and its availability.

One to watch, for sure.