Anthropic has grown faster than any company in history at its scale, and it seems to have been helped along by top technical talent in the industry.
Over the past 18 months, a striking number of CTOs — from companies ranging from billion-dollar enterprise software platforms to well-funded AI startups — have quietly left their C-suite roles to join Anthropic under a single designation: Member of Technical Staff (MTS).
The MTS Title: Deliberately Vague, Deliberately Powerful
It’s worth understanding the MTS designation itself. “Member of Technical Staff” is the standard engineering title at Anthropic and OpenAI alike, used across research, infrastructure, safety, and product engineering — regardless of seniority. As OpenAI president Greg Brockman has publicly explained, the labs deliberately chose not to separate “researchers” from “engineers,” and the MTS title reflects that philosophy.
The breadth of the label is a feature, not a bug — and almost certainly a competitive one. It tells you almost nothing about what someone actually does. A former CTO carrying that title could be overseeing large teams, directing critical systems, or shaping entire research agendas. Competitors looking at a LinkedIn profile see only “Member of Technical Staff.” Anthropic’s flat structure ensures that what these people are actually building stays opaque.
The Hires
Mike Krieger — Instagram → Anthropic (Jan 2026)
Mike Krieger co-founded Instagram in 2010 with Kevin Systrom and served as its CTO until 2018, overseeing the platform’s engineering team as it scaled from a few million users to over one billion monthly actives. After leaving Meta, he co-founded Artifact — an AI-powered news aggregator — with Systrom, before it was acquired by Yahoo. He joined Anthropic in 2024 as Chief Product Officer, one of its most prominent hires, overseeing product engineering, product management, and design.
In January 2026, Krieger stepped back from the CPO role to co-lead Anthropic’s internal incubator, Labs — the team behind experimental products at the frontier of Claude’s capabilities, including Claude Code. His move from CPO to MTS — announced publicly on X — was framed not as a demotion but as a return to building.
Niki Parmar — Adept AI → Anthropic (Jan 2025)
Niki Parmar is one of the original co-authors of the 2017 “Attention Is All You Need” paper — the foundational Transformer research that underpins virtually every modern AI system. She spent years at Google Brain before co-founding Adept AI Labs, where she served as CTO, focusing on building general intelligence systems for human-computer collaboration. After leaving Adept, she co-founded Essential AI alongside fellow Transformer co-author Ashish Vaswani, raising nearly $65 million from Google, NVIDIA, and AMD, before departing in late 2024.
She announced her Anthropic move in February 2025, revealing she had quietly joined the previous December. Parmar contributed to the development of Claude 3.7 Sonnet — one of the most consequential model releases in the company’s history. Her pedigree is extraordinary, and her presence signals that Anthropic is attracting researchers at the very top of the field.
Henry Shi — Super.com → Anthropic (Jul 2025)
Henry Shi co-founded Super.com (formerly Snapcommerce) in 2016, serving as its COO and CTO as the company scaled from zero to $200 million in annual revenue and over 50 million users. He stepped back to the board in mid-2025 after spending nine months carefully transitioning leadership — and walked straight into Anthropic.
Shi has been transparent about his reasoning, writing publicly that Anthropic’s density of exceptional people — combined with his conviction that AGI timelines are shorter than most believe — made the opportunity too significant to pass up. He works directly with Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann and had been an early Anthropic enterprise customer during his Super.com days, giving him a first-hand view of Claude’s capabilities before making the leap.
Bryan McCann — You.com → Anthropic (Mar 2026)
Bryan McCann was the co-founder and CTO of You.com, the AI-powered search engine that attracted significant attention as an alternative to traditional search. In March 2026, he left to join Anthropic as a Member of Technical Staff, according to The Information. You.com subsequently promoted Saahil Jain, one of its earliest engineering hires, to the CTO role. McCann brings deep expertise in search, retrieval systems, and language model integration — all directly relevant to Anthropic’s expanding product ambitions.
Peter Bailis — Workday → Anthropic (Mar 2026)
The Workday hire generated the most coverage — and arguably the most competitive alarm. Peter Bailis joined Workday as CTO in May 2025, a prominent appointment that came with a mandate to lead the company’s agentic AI strategy across an $8 billion revenue business with 18,000 employees. He lasted less than a year. In March 2026, an Anthropic spokesperson confirmed he had joined as a Member of Technical Staff focused on reinforcement learning engineering.
Bailis’s background spans Stanford computer science faculty, the founding of Sisu Data (raised $128 million, acquired by Snowflake in 2023), and a stint as VP of Engineering at Google Cloud, where he led AI for data products including NL2SQL and retrieval-augmented generation. The competitive subtext is sharp: Workday’s CEO had publicly confirmed Anthropic as a Workday customer as recently as February 2026. Anthropic has since been posting roles focused on “people products” — HR tools that directly compete with Workday’s core business.
Workday has since named Gabe Monroy as Bailis’s replacement
What This Pattern Actually Means
It’s genuinely unusual for one company to attract this many CTOs in such a short window. CTOs of established, scaled companies don’t typically take individual contributor roles anywhere — let alone in clusters, let alone at a single destination.
Several things make Anthropic’s pull different. The company has grown from near-zero revenue to a $30 billion annualized run-rate in roughly three years — a trajectory with few precedents. A 2025 SignalFire report found engineers at OpenAI were eight times more likely to leave for Anthropic than the reverse; at DeepMind, the ratio was nearly eleven-to-one. Retention at Anthropic runs at 80% for employees hired over the last two years — the highest among frontier labs. It is also the only major AI lab to have all its co-founders intact.
For technically ambitious leaders, the calculus has shifted. A CTO title at an established SaaS company means institutional authority and organizational management, but also distance from the actual work. An MTS role at Anthropic means direct proximity to one of the most consequential engineering efforts in history — model training decisions, research agendas, and systems that will likely define the next decade of computing.
The MTS designation obscures exactly what each of these people is doing. But it’s reasonable to assume that none of them are isolated individual contributors. Former CTOs with the depth of Parmar, Bailis, Krieger, or McCann are not writing tickets in a queue. They are almost certainly leading efforts, advising on strategy, and shaping systems at scale — with Anthropic’s flat structure simply declining to advertise that fact.