Cat Wu, Anthropic's head of product for Claude Code and one of the tool's two public faces alongside its creator Boris Cherny, announced on X on November 3 that she has left the company after two years. 'Friday was my last day at Anthropic,' she wrote — Friday was October 30. Wu also oversaw Cowork, Anthropic's knowledge-work agent for non-engineers. Anthropic confirmed the departure to Business Insider; Wu gave no reason and named no next role, answering a question about taking time off with 'post agi!'

Wu joined in the summer of 2024, when Claude Code was still a small internal tool, and fronted its February 2025 research-preview launch video with Cherny. In her farewell post she charted how the product changed under her tenure: early users manually approved every permission prompt and mostly used Claude for questions and test-writing, while today auto-approve is the default and Claude handles large migrations and builds new products.

She is not leaving alone. Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar and desktop developer Anthony Morris both announced their own departures on October 24, so three members of the team have gone in under two weeks — weeks before Anthropic's planned IPO, with trading expected as early as the week of November 16. No successor has been named and no roadmap change has been announced alongside the exits.

Update, November 5: Wu has said where she went. At 00:25 UTC she posted that she is joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products, working with Thibault Sottiaux — Tibo — and OpenAI's product team to build agents that 'have your back and your team's, and keep you in control.' The post passed 2.5 million views within ten hours; OpenAI confirmed the hire to Business Insider, per later reporting, while Anthropic still has not named her successor. Austin Lau, who helped build Anthropic's growth function, also posted the same night that he had recently joined OpenAI.