Cat Wu, who built up Claude Code, joins OpenAI a day after leaving Anthropic to lead Core Products PM

Cat Wu, who led product for Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic, is moving to OpenAI. She posted on X on Nov 4 that she is joining to lead product management for Core Products, one day after announcing her exit from Anthropic. The post passed 120,000 views and about 1,900 likes.

Wu credited OpenAI with "showing the world that scaling works" and bringing AI to more than a billion people. She will work with Codex lead Thibault Sottiaux to build "agents that have your back and your team's, and keep you in control." Sottiaux replied that he was "stoked to be building together," and OpenAI's Noam Brown and Peter Steinberger also welcomed her. A reply calling it "some Figo moves" drew 97 likes.

Her farewell post a day earlier spread far wider: 3.5 million views and about 14,900 likes. "Friday was my last day at Anthropic," she wrote, recalling that two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, she steered it for tens of hours to build an RL environment without writing a line of code by hand. At launch most users approved every permission prompt manually; today the default is trusting Claude to auto-approve. Anthropic confirmed her departure to Business Insider.

The timing is drawing attention, with Anthropic's IPO planned for this month. Asked whether leaving right before the IPO lets you sell without waiting out the lockup, Wu said she had "no idea and [it] wasn't a factor." Analytics India Magazine counts three Claude Code people leaving within 10 days: Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris, who built Claude Code on desktop, both announced exits on Oct 24, followed by Wu. None gave a reason.