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On November 3 local time, Claude Code product lead Cat Wu announced on X that she was leaving Anthropic, and the company subsequently confirmed the news; she did not disclose the specific reason. She and Boris Cherny, the original creator of Claude Code, were regarded as the two most important core figures of the project, and she was also responsible for Cowork, an AI work assistant aimed at non-software engineers. On November 5, Cat Wu announced on X that she was joining OpenAI as product lead in the core product group, reporting to Tibo, and will take part in building a team-level AI assistant. Reports say she joined Anthropic in the summer of 2024, and October 30 was her last working day at the company.
AI-generated from public reports
Latest development · Report
OpenAI is rumored to release GPT-6.2 Astra this week; Claude Code product lead Cat Wu has defected…Developments
2 confirmed developments
Cat Wu announces joining OpenAI as Product Lead of the Core Product Group
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Nov 6
36Kr · AI
OpenAI is rumored to release GPT-6.2 Astra this week; Claude Code product lead Cat Wu has defected…
According to The Information, OpenAI could release Astra, Sol, and a new model focused on cybersecurity as early as this Friday, and the community has also circulated rumors that GPT-6.2 Astra and 6.2 Sol have already been deployed to Google Cloud. During the same period, Cat Wu, head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, officially announced her departure and joined OpenAI's Core Products division, reporting to Codex lead Tibo Sottiaux; within ten days, four core members of the Claude Code team have left. The article also mentions the TamaGPT handheld hardware experiment showcased on OpenAI's official blog, stating that two employees, with zero manual modifications, had Astra complete the enclosure structure, PCB routing, and firmware design, producing a physical prototype in under a week.
Nov 5
TMTPost · AGI
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Joins OpenAI as Anthropic Loses Three Core Members Ahead of IPO
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu announced on November 5 that she is joining OpenAI, where she will be responsible for product management of core products and report to Thibault Sottiaux. She previously left Anthropic on October 30, and around the same time, Claude Code desktop creator Anthony Morris and core engineer Thariq Shihipar also departed in succession. Anthropic has just updated its IPO prospectus, in which it lists talent retention after employee equity vesting as a potential risk.
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The Decoder
Anthropic's Claude Code Product Lead Catherine Wu Joins OpenAI
Anthropic's Claude Code product lead Catherine Wu has joined OpenAI, where she will be responsible for product management for "Core Products." Thibault Sottiaux, who leads Codex and ChatGPT, welcomed her with the term "CatGPT." Wu said she hopes to build agents that can take work off users' hands while keeping users in control. In addition, growth marketing manager Austin Lau has also moved from Anthropic to OpenAI; recently, Anthropic also lost skills and context engineer Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris, who was responsible for Claude Code Desktop, and the latter two have not yet joined OpenAI.
Phoenix Tech
OpenAI poaches Claude Code product lead Cat Wu as Head of Core Product Management
Cat Wu, former product lead for Anthropic's Claude Code, has officially joined OpenAI as Head of Product Management for Core Product, working on core product and AI agent-related efforts and reporting to Tibo Sottiaux. She witnessed Claude Code's journey from an internal prototype to commercialization and also helped lead Cowork, a product aimed at non-coding knowledge work scenarios. As of February 2026, Claude Code's annualized revenue run rate has exceeded $2.5 billion, more than doubling since the start of the year.
Leiphone
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Joins OpenAI; Three Core Members Leave Anthropic Within Ten Days
Former Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu announced on X that she is joining OpenAI as Product Lead for the Core Product Group, reporting to Tibo, and will help build a team-level AI assistant. This is the third core member of the Claude Code team to leave within ten days; the previous departures were desktop lead Anthony Morris and core Agent engineer Thariq Shihipar, at a time when Anthropic has submitted its S-1 prospectus and plans to launch its roadshow on November 9. The article also mentions that OpenAI announced the acquisition of Pierre Computer one day before Cat Wu joined, and that its open-source codebases Trees and Diffs have already been integrated into Codex.
cnBeta
Claude Code lead Cat Wu announces joining OpenAI one day after leaving
Cat Wu, a key figure behind Claude Code, confirmed she is joining OpenAI just one day after announcing her departure from Anthropic. She will work with Nick Turley on enterprise products and with Ashley Alexander on consumer product business, reporting to Tibo Sottiaux. She joined Anthropic in summer 2024, overseeing Claude Code and Cowork, an AI tool for non-coding tasks, and said October 30 was her last working day at the company. The personnel change comes as Anthropic prepares for an IPO and as OpenAI and Anthropic accelerate their rivalry in the AI coding and enterprise agent markets.
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Zhidongxi
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Announces Joining OpenAI
Cat Wu, the core product lead for Claude Code and Cowork, has announced she will join OpenAI to lead core product management. She joined Anthropic in August 2024, initially serving as a product manager on the research product team; starting in 2025 she drove the productization of Claude Code and built out its overall feature framework, and later took charge of the Cowork product line. Since June of this year, four core members of Claude Code have departed; the other three are engineer Thariq Shihipar, Claude Code Desktop creator Anthony Morris, and Claude and Cowork design lead Jenny Wen.
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Nov 4
36Kr · AI
Claude Code founding product manager Cat Wu announces departure from Anthropic
Cat Wu, head of product for Claude Code and Cowork and founding product manager, posted that last Friday was her final day at Anthropic, making her the fourth core member to leave the Claude Code team in 10 days. CLI core member Thariq Shihipar, desktop version creator Anthony Morris, and engineering manager Sunil Shah had already left in succession. The article also reviews her path from an investor at Index Ventures to joining Claude Code, her brief two-week stint with Boris Cherny at Cursor before returning, and her experience leading the team to build products such as the desktop version and Cowork.
cnBeta
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Departs, Anthropic Loses Key Product Executive on the Eve of Its IPO
Cat Wu announced her departure from Anthropic on X on November 3 local time, and the company subsequently confirmed the news; she did not disclose a specific reason. She and Boris Cherny, the original creator of Claude Code, were regarded as the two most important core figures on the project, and she also oversaw Cowork, an AI work assistant aimed at non-software engineers. Another project member, Thariq Shihipar, announced his departure last month; this change comes as Anthropic is about to launch its IPO.
Analytics India Magazine
Three Core Members of Claude Code Leave Anthropic Within Ten Days
Three employees associated with Anthropic's Claude Code product left successively within 10 days, including Thariq Shihipar, Anthony Morris, and Cat Wu, involved respectively in product development, the desktop application, and product management. Wu announced her departure on November 3, saying October 30 was her last day; Shihipar and Morris announced their departures on October 24. Anthropic said in February that Claude Code's annualized revenue run rate had exceeded $2.5 billion, and the company also disclosed in an amended S-1 filing submitted on November 2 that its September-quarter revenue was $16.96 billion, up 47% quarter over quarter.
Ayi AI Notes
Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Leaves Anthropic
Claude Code product lead Cat Wu announced that she has left Anthropic, with last Friday being her final day at the company. She recalled that two years ago, when Claude Code was still just a small internal tool, she spent dozens of hours guiding it to build a reinforcement learning environment without writing a single line of code herself, and then joined the team. She noted that when the product first launched, most people manually confirmed permissions one by one, but today the default has changed to trusting Claude's judgment and granting authorization automatically.
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Unite.AI
Cat Wu Steps Down as Claude Code Product Lead, Ending Two-Year Tenure
Cat Wu announced on X on November 3, 2026, that she is leaving Anthropic; she had served as Claude Code product lead for two years. During her tenure, she drove Claude Code from an internal experiment toward more autonomous software development, and was involved in products such as Cowork and Tag. Anthropic announced auto mode on August 7, 2026, which lets tool calls be filtered by a classifier and automatically approves safe operations; if blocked 3 times in a row or 20 times cumulatively in a single session, it reverts to manual approval.
Cat Wu
Cat Wu announces departure from Anthropic, reflecting on two years of Claude Code
Cat Wu announced that last Friday was her final day at Anthropic; she was involved in turning Claude Code from an internal small tool into an industry-grade product. She recalled that two years ago she had Claude Code build an RL env, guiding it for dozens of hours without writing a single line of code herself; early users of the product approved permission prompts almost one by one manually, whereas now Claude's judgment is trusted by default for automatic approval, and Claude is already able to complete large-scale migrations and build new products.
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