Anthropic's Katelyn Lesse & Angela Jiang: Building an Ecosystem, not a Walled Garden
In a Nutshell
Anthropic is building a three-layer platform—knowledge primitives, execution infrastructure, and coordination strategies—that gives builders the same tools used internally rather than creating a walled garden. The company prioritizes open standards like MCP and self-hosted sandboxes while focusing on token-heavy, iterative use cases like coding, finance, and legal where users continuously generate more work. The key insight is shifting from single harnesses to composable "strategies" that assign different jobs to tokens—such as best-of-N approaches, model advising, and memory writing—to maximize intelligence per dollar as models become more capable.
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Platform encompasses both the externally facing APIs and developer platform that people build on top of when creating applications and systems that access Claude's intelligence, as well as the internal product infrastructure that Anthropic's own apps build on top of.
The team maintains two distinct north stars given their dual internal and external responsibilities. Internally, the focus is providing maximum leverage for internal teams to ship products quickly with a reliable platform foundation, with speed being a particularly intentional priority. Externally, the goal is giving any builder the tools needed to work with Claude to build whatever they want, bringing the platform close to the builder's specific business context.
Integration work with hyperscalers like AWS and Google supports this external goal. The team creates primitives that allow builders to express their product vision and enables custom software development that was previously economically impractical. This sometimes manifests as primitives, APIs, and higher-order abstractions, and other times as standards like skills and MCP that Claude needs to be useful.
The team intentionally keeps internal and external offerings aligned rather than bifurcating them. The same primitives are available to everyone, whether internal or external builders. This approach stems from the recognition that model capabilities are evolving exponentially and form factors are constantly changing—two years ago the focus was chat interfaces, now agents are emphasized, and new form factors will emerge.
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