Overview

Scott White, Head of Product at Anthropic, shared how Claude became strong at coding through a mix of intentional design and surprising emergent capabilities that turned into products like Claude Code. He explained how Anthropic chooses what to build by balancing customer demand, commercial opportunity, and learning from model gaps. He pushed back on the idea that new models bring only small improvements, noting big jumps for complex, agentic tasks. Scott emphasized that AI frees people from toil, expands professional skills, and gives “superpowers,” with students and workers needing to prototype, play, and adopt new tools quickly. He highlighted the role of evals as “new product requirement docs,” the balance between usability and enterprise needs, and the importance of safety and constitutional AI in tackling risks like hallucinations and prompt injection. Finally, he noted how reasoning paired with tool use is transforming real-world applications, from coding to enterprise processes.