Inside the tiny Anthropic team designed to kill bad ideas fast and keep starting over

Anthropic's Code with Claude conference in May 2026.

Don Feria/AP Content Services for Anthropic Anthropic's Labs team is an in-flux group of around 20 trying to make products at the AI frontier.

Like Bell Labs or Google's X, the team prototypes new ideas and often pivots.

It built Claude Code.

Cofounder and Labs head Ben Mann spoke about the group's work as Anthropic prepares to go public.

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.