70% of Projects Doomed to Be Cut? Behind Claude Code's Success, Anthropic Nurtures a Team of "Failures"

Anthropic's internal Labs team, with fewer than 20 members, is known for its "high elimination rate for innovation speed." Projects undergo a "survive or pivot" review every two weeks, with about 70% to 80% of "bets" ultimately being cut. The few successful projects are incubated independently, and Claude Code is one of them. Leveraging its proximity to the frontier of model research and development, Labs continuously rapidly productizes new capabilities and feeds back into model iteration through real-world applications.