Claude Code is now the most-copied product in AI. Every frontier lab has built one. Every VC has funded three. Anthropic didn't set out to build it.
What happened, per Dario: early 2025, he told the team "models are good enough now — experiment with using them on your own work." Someone wired up a CLI. Internally, everyone started using it. The name was Claude CLI before it was Claude Code. At some point Dario looked around and said: this has product-market fit inside the building. Let's launch it.
The interesting thing isn't the origin story. It's the filter. Anthropic only ships products where they're the customer. "We didn't launch a pharma company because we don't have the resources to know what we'd need." That's the whole test.
Most product decks answer the wrong question. They ask: is there a market? The better question is: are you in it? Because if you're not, you're guessing at everything a real user would feel in five minutes.
Build what you use. Launch what you can't stop using yourself.
