Cat Wu joins OpenAI: Claude Code's head of product switches sides

Cat Wu, who spent two years building Claude Code at Anthropic, announced on X on November 5 that she is joining OpenAI, where she will lead product management on the Core Products team. Two days earlier she wrote that her last day at Anthropic was Friday, October 30.

Who is Cat Wu and what will she do at OpenAI?

According to OfficeChai, Cat Wu was head of product for Claude Code, and later for Cowork too. Together with Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, she was one of the tool’s best-known faces (some commentators even called them “Batman and Robin”).

At OpenAI she will lead product management in Core Products. In her post she mentions working with Thibault Sottiaux and a team of PMs, and according to OfficeChai she will report to Sottiaux. She describes her goal like this: build agents that “have your back and your team’s” while leaving the user in control.

The response came fast. Three minutes after her post, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, welcomed her to the team, and shortly after that Sottiaux himself did the same.

Why is this such big news?

Because Claude Code is now one of Anthropic’s most important products, and OpenAI is fighting it with Codex. By late morning on November 5, Cat Wu’s post had about 14,000 likes and close to 2.4 million views. Her farewell to Anthropic on November 3 got more than 16,000 likes and 4.3 million views.

In that farewell she described how she got started. Two years ago, when Claude Code was still a small internal tool, she asked it to build an RL environment and steered it for dozens of hours without writing a single line of code by hand. As she puts it, “it worked, I was hooked”, and she joined the team.

She also described how using the tool has changed. At first, most people approved every permission prompt by hand and used Claude mainly to answer questions and write tests. Today, she says, we trust Claude’s judgment by default and let it approve actions on its own, while it runs large migrations and builds new products. She closed by thanking the Claude Code, Cowork and Tag teams.

Is this the first departure from the Claude Code team?

No. On October 24, Thariq Shihipar announced that he was leaving Anthropic after more than a year on Claude Code. His post got over 31,000 likes and 6.5 million views. Thariq said he would take a short break before “something new” but didn’t say where he was going. Interestingly, in the same post he recommended following, among others, Cat Wu.

According to OfficeChai, Anthony Morris, who describes himself as the creator of the Claude Code desktop app, announced his departure around the same time.

All of this is happening in the weeks before Anthropic’s stock market debut. I covered the public prospectus and the ANT ticker in my piece on Anthropic stock. One thing is worth keeping in perspective, though: neither Cat Wu nor Thariq links their decision to the IPO. That’s just context the media is pointing to.

What could Cat Wu’s move to OpenAI change?

For now, we know very little that’s concrete. No start date at OpenAI has been given, and there are no known product plans. The only hint is the post itself: agents that work for the whole team and don’t take control away from people.

That fits the direction OpenAI has recently taken with Codex. This week the company acquired Pierre Computer, the makers of a Git built for AI agents, and from December ChatGPT and Codex are set to have a shared token limit. Cat Wu saw from the inside how Claude Code went from approving every action by hand to running migrations on its own. How much of that experience carries over to Codex, we’ll only see in future releases.

And for us, Claude Code users? The team still has Boris Cherny and the rest of the people who keep shipping changes regularly (like the recent cheaper background agent statuses). The question is whether the pace holds after several well-known people left within two weeks.

FAQ

Who is Cat Wu?

She is a product manager who worked at Anthropic from 2024 on Claude Code, according to OfficeChai as head of product, and later also on Cowork. Her last day at Anthropic was October 30, 2026.

What will Cat Wu do at OpenAI?

According to her November 5 post, she will lead product management on the Core Products team. She will work with Thibault Sottiaux and build agents that leave the user in control.

Did Thariq Shihipar also join OpenAI?

Nothing suggests so. Thariq announced on October 24 that he was leaving Anthropic and taking a break, but he didn’t say where he was headed.