OpenAI rival Anthropic hired former Instagram co-founder and CTO Mike Krieger as chief product officer, part of a plan to expand the reach of its Claude chatbot.

The Google- and Amazon-backed start-up stated Krieger will oversee its product engineering, management and design efforts as it works to broaden its suite of enterprise applications.

In a blog, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote Krieger’s “background in developing intuitive products and user experiences will be invaluable as we create new ways for people to interact with Claude, particularly in the workplace”.

Krieger is credited with growing Instagram’s engineering team to more than 450 people along with scaling the platform to more than 1 billion users before it was sold to Meta Platforms (then Facebook) in 2012.

US-based Anthropic announced this week Claude is now available across Europe.

Google, Microsoft, Amazon and ChatGPT developer OpenAI are among the companies fiercely competing with each other across the generative AI sector.