Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Departs, Anthropic Loses Key Product Executive on the Eve of Its IPO

Cat Wu announced her departure on the social platform X on November 3 local time. In her post, she thanked the Claude Code team and the broader user base, and reviewed the product's development journey, though she did not disclose the specific reason for leaving. Anthropic subsequently confirmed the news.

As the product lead for Claude Code, Cat Wu and Boris Cherny, the product's original creator, were regarded as the two most important core figures on the project. Under their leadership, Claude Code rapidly grew from an internal experimental project into one of the most influential products in the AI programming field, and also became an important weapon for Anthropic in challenging OpenAI's competitive position.

The report noted that the success of Claude Code not only helped Anthropic gain widespread attention, but also brought the company sustained revenue growth and more ample funding for computing power. As more and more developers use it for software development work, large technology companies' usage of Claude model services has continued to rise, and related spending has also grown rapidly.

Cat Wu joined Anthropic in the summer of 2024, and what she first encountered was an early prototype version of Claude Code. She later recalled that after her first experience with the product, she was drawn in by its capabilities and decided to join the team to participate in development work.

In February 2025, Anthropic officially released Claude Code in the form of a research preview. At the time, the company showcased the product to the outside world through a short demo video, and the people featured in the video were none other than Cat Wu and Boris Cherny.

In the summer of the same year, the two briefly left Anthropic and joined the AI programming startup Cursor, but returned to Anthropic a few weeks later to continue leading the development of Claude Code. After that, the product experienced explosive growth and began to become rapidly popular at the end of 2025.

Initially, software engineers became the primary users of Claude Code. With the help of generative AI capabilities, the tool can automatically complete a large number of coding tasks, greatly improving development efficiency. As the scale of enterprise customers continued to expand, Claude Code gradually became one of Anthropic's most important commercial products.

In addition to Claude Code, Cat Wu was also responsible for the Cowork project. This is an AI work assistant aimed at non-software engineers, also based on Anthropic's core model capabilities, mainly serving knowledge-based work scenarios.

In an interview on a podcast program in April this year, Cat Wu talked about her work goal being to push Claude Code toward the "AGI-ized version" envisioned by Boris Cherny. Here, AGI refers to "artificial general intelligence," that is, an AI system capable of demonstrating near-human-level capabilities across a wide range of tasks.

She said her work involved not only product planning, but also coordination and collaboration with multiple departments such as marketing, sales, and finance, while also being responsible for recruiting some product managers. Over the past period, she also frequently responded directly to users' feedback and suggestions about Claude Code through social media.

It is worth noting that this is not the only important personnel change in the Claude Code team recently. Another member involved in project development, Thariq Shihipar, announced his departure last month, making the outside world pay more attention to the team's future stability.

Cat Wu's departure comes at a critical stage as Anthropic is about to launch an IPO. The market generally believes that Claude Code is one of the important engines driving the company's growth, and whether the changes in core management can be smoothly absorbed will become an important indicator for investors observing the company.

As for future plans, Cat Wu has not yet provided detailed explanations. However, below her departure statement, some netizens joked about whether she could finally start a long vacation. In response, she replied with the line "Maybe after AGI is achieved," bringing her Anthropic career to a close with a distinctly industry-flavored ending.