Anthropic's office is surprisingly AI-first, even for an AI company

When you think of an operating system, you probably think of interfaces to open, workflows to follow, screens to move through. Work has always lived inside those boundaries. At Anthropic, that logic is starting to break. The company is reorganizing itself around a simple, destabilizing premise: work no longer needs a fixed system to run through.

Anthropic says employees now rely on Claude, its flagship AI model, along with its products Code and Cowork, for most of their day-to-day work. The model is starting to function as an "internal operating system." What once required navigating multiple systems, stitching together data, and coordinating across teams now begins with a single prompt. From there, Claude interprets intent, pulls in context, and produces outputs that often bypass the underlying systems entirely.

Mike Krieger, co-lead of Labs at Anthropic, says the company is focused on making individual employees materially better at the work they already do, and capable of doing things they could not reliably do on their own. "We build products where we see demand from customers, or when something our team is already using internally turns out to be valuable enough to ship," Krieger tells Fast Company. "The operating system framing is the right instinct."

In a prompt-driven system, there is always a risk that people perform the same task in different ways, leading to uneven quality and making work harder to track or review. Krieger, the Instagram cofounder and former CTO who also served as Anthropic's chief product officer, says the company has built a layer to keep things consistent. That layer comes in the form of "Skills," packaged, version-controlled workflows that include the instructions, context, and steps that work, and can be reused across the company.