Anthropic's Code with Claude conference in May 2026.
Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic
Inside Anthropic, an unorthodox group can take a lot of credit for the AI company's meteoric rise.The company's Labs team is a rotating cast of around 20 employees, tasked with spinning up entirely new ideas. Led by Anthropic cofounder Ben Mann, it's responsible for the definitive AI tool of the year: Claude Code. As Anthropic prepares to go public, Labs will play a crucial role in turning its frontier AI models into impactful products.Mann spoke with Business Insider about the team's efforts and changing ambitions, and how he views product development inside the AI company.A few years ago, Mann said he had to convince the company that it needed to start releasing products at all, rather than ride philanthropic funding toward advanced AI. He created Labs in 2024 to freely ideate on new product ideas, and the team has served as an engine of growth, building the uber-popular Claude Code, the Model Context Protocol that connects AI agents to data sources, and this year's Claude Design. It also counts leaders like Instagram cofounder Mike Krieger.The idea of incubating new product ideas on a special team is hardly new. Mann cited the famous research organization Bell Labs as a model, and he worked on a Labs-esque team at Google called Area 120 in 2018. Google also has its "moonshot factory," known now as X, which helped build Waymo and Google Brain.Labs helps Anthropic seize a crucial advantage: its product developers quickly hear how AI models are improving, which gives them a head start on building tools."We do treat it as a startup incubator in the true sense of the term," Mann said, "and we expect most of the bets to fail."Mann said Labs has about a 20% to 30% success rate with its ideas, some of which get folded into other prototypes or products, such as Anthropic's Claude Chrome extension."We've had more hits than I would have expected, and the hits that we've had have gone really far," he added.
