Cat Wu joins OpenAI, a sudden wave of core employee departures breaks out at Anthropic ahead of its IPO

On November 5, Cat Wu, the recently departed Head of Product for Claude Code, announced her next career move: 

She will join OpenAI to lead product management for core products, and will work in collaboration with Thibault Sottiaux (Tibo) and his team.

The day before, Cat Wu had just announced that she left Anthropic on October 30. 

This is actually her second departure. Back in July 2025, she switched to Cursor alongside Boris Cherny, the founder of Claude Code, and just two weeks later, both of them returned to Anthropic. 

Now the pair has parted ways again: Boris stays at Anthropic, while Cat Wu has turned around and joined its "arch-rival" OpenAI. 

It is worth noting that Cat Wu is not the only core member who has left recently. On October 23, Anthony Morris, the creator of the Claude Code desktop client, stepped down; the next day, Thariq Shihipar, a core engineer, also announced his departure. 

Anthropic has just publicly filed its IPO prospectus, a capital feast that is likely to generate huge wealth is right around the corner, yet Claude Code has lost three key senior members in just two weeks. 

Meanwhile, OpenAI has welcomed its star product lead. 

You Leave, I Leave Too

Cat Wu was one of the earliest participants in the Claude Code project. 

(Cat Wu's personal profile has been updated) 

In August 2024, she joined Anthropic, initially in charge of product management for research-focused initiatives. In the autumn of the same year, Boris Cherny developed the early prototype of Claude Code. Back then, this tool was called Claude CLI, which could access files, run terminal commands, and modify code directly. 

When Boris first posted the demo video on the company's internal Slack, he only received two or three likes, and Cat Wu was one of the most active testers. 

Even at that time, she started using Claude CLI to build reinforcement learning training environments. She spent dozens of hours continuously giving it instructions, and successfully completed the task without writing a single line of code herself, which made her obsessed with the product. 

In "The making of Claude Code", the official oral history of Claude Code released by Anthropic this year, she recalled that she often sent Boris long, detailed product feedback. Boris responded very quickly: in many cases, right after Cat Wu put forward a certain requirement, Boris would tell her that the relevant feature had already been implemented (or the bug had been fixed). 

Cat Wu gradually became one of the most active internal users of Claude CLI, until Boris finally took the initiative to extend an invitation to her: "Do you want to join us?" 

From then on, the two officially began to work as a team. 

In February 2025, when Claude CLI was preparing for public release, the situation was not optimistic. Cat Wu revealed that the reaction from early trial users was rather lukewarm. Some people thought the product was interesting, but complained that there were too many bugs. The team finally decided to release it as planned. This tool was officially renamed Claude Code at this time, and debuted in the form of a research preview. 

Few people could have imagined at that time that this tool with an underwhelming early reception would quickly grow into one of Anthropic's most successful products. 

Cat Wu also gradually became one of the most representative figures of Claude Code, responsible for the iteration and development of the product together with Boris Cherny. In July 2025, the two left Anthropic together, and returned together just two weeks later. At that time, they always seemed to advance and retreat together. 

In May this year, when TechCrunch interviewed Cat Wu, it even mentioned that the outside world called the two "Batman and Robin" of Anthropic. Cat Wu was in charge of the product direction, while Boris was responsible for technical development. The two often participated in interviews and speeches together, introducing the development of Claude Code to the outside world. 

Cat Wu's work is not limited to programming products. She is also in charge of Claude Cowork for non-programmers, and participated in the development of agent products such as Claude Tag.

In July this year, at the AI Engineer World's Fair, she also participated in an interview with developer Simon Willison together with Thariq Shihipar, another core engineer of Claude Code. 

In this conversation, Thariq also told the story of joining Anthropic. 

Around the release of Claude Opus 4 in 2025, a friend sent him a message, strongly recommending that he try Claude Code. Thariq was greatly shocked after testing it, and immediately had the idea of joining Anthropic. After that, he participated in the development of core features such as context engineering and dynamic workflows of Claude Code.

In July this year, Thariq also published a technical article as an Anthropic engineer, introducing how the team redesigned the context mechanism for the new generation of Claude models, reducing Claude Code's system prompt words by more than 80%. 

For Claude Code users, he is also a very active figure in the developer community, often publicly introducing new features and sharing engineering experience. 

But on October 24, Thariq suddenly announced his departure. 

He recalled that he had watched Claude Code grow to a scale far beyond imagination, and deeply identified with Anthropic's mission. He plans to take a break first before moving on to new endeavors. 

At the end of his farewell letter, he specifically recommended several members of the Claude Code team worth following, including Cat Wu and Boris Cherny. 

Ten days later, Cat Wu also announced her resignation. 

Another departing member, Anthony Morris, is the creator of the Claude Code desktop client.

In the early days, Claude Code was mainly operated through the command line, which had a certain threshold for users who were not familiar with terminals. Anthony promoted the development of the desktop client, hoping that more people could directly use AI to complete software development tasks. 

In April this year, he announced the launch of the redesigned Claude Code desktop client, making it more convenient for users to run multiple AI programming tasks at the same time. 

Until mid-October, he was still publicly responding to user feedback on the desktop client, promising to continue improving its features. 

But on October 23, he also left Anthropic. 

In his farewell statement, Anthony wrote that he always believed that everyone could be a creator. Being part of Anthropic's mission was one of the most important experiences in his career. Leaving his friends, the product he had poured his heart into, and the company's mission was the hardest decision of his professional life. 

However, he finally has time to play *GTA 6* now. 

The three of them all expressed recognition of Anthropic in their farewell statements, made no public accusations against the company, and did not disclose the specific reasons for their departures. 

In February this year, Anthropic disclosed that the annualized revenue run rate of Claude Code had exceeded 2.5 billion US dollars, and the number of weekly active users doubled compared with the beginning of the year. 

Although the latest IPO prospectus does not separately update the revenue of Claude Code, it further reveals its commercial value. 

In the third quarter of 2026, Claude Enterprise users who did not use Claude Code spent an average of less than 75 US dollars per month; among Claude Enterprise users who used Claude Code, the top 5% of high-spending users had a monthly per capita expenditure about 20 times that of the former group. 

In the same period, Anthropic's overall revenue reached about 17 billion US dollars, and the cumulative revenue in the first three quarters was 33.2 billion US dollars. 

From its debut in February 2025 to becoming one of Anthropic's most important revenue growth engines, Claude Code took only more than a year. 

Now Anthropic is sprinting towards its IPO. It is at this very moment that several key members who participated in creating it have left the company one after another. 

Cat Wu directly switched to OpenAI, joining Anthropic's most "disliked" old peer and competitor. 

New Colleagues of the Old Rival

According to Cat Wu's own post, she will be responsible for core product management at OpenAI, working as a colleague with Tibo.

Tibo, nicknamed "Cyber Godfather", probably needs no further introduction. In May this year, OpenAI carried out an organizational restructuring, bringing businesses including ChatGPT, Codex and APIs into a unified core product team, with Tibo in charge of core product and platform businesses. OpenAI President Greg Brockman is responsible for the overall product strategy, former ChatGPT lead Nick Turley shifted to enterprise business, and Ashley Alexander is in charge of consumer products.

According to foreign media reports, OpenAI has confirmed that Cat Wu will report to Tibo and collaborate with Nick Turley and Ashley Alexander. However, OpenAI has not disclosed which specific products she will be responsible for.

Tibo also reposted Cat Wu's official announcement post, welcoming her to OpenAI and looking forward to working together in the future. He then joked in the comment section: "CatGPT".

Cat Wu's joining happens to coincide with the phase when OpenAI is continuously adjusting its product organization and business direction.

In the organizational restructuring in May this year, Brockman clearly proposed that OpenAI needs to integrate ChatGPT and Codex into a unified product experience, and compete for both consumer and enterprise markets at the same time; in June, OpenAI announced that Codex had more than 5 million weekly users, about 20% of whom were not developers, covering groups such as analysts, marketers, designers and researchers.

At the DevDay conference on September 29, OpenAI further disclosed that the total weekly users of Codex and ChatGPT Work have exceeded 35 million.

This tool, which was originally targeted at programmers, is being extended to a wider range of work scenarios.

Just last week, OpenAI also announced a new billing adjustment: starting from December, the usage quotas for advanced features of Plus, Pro and Business users in ChatGPT and Codex will be merged and calculated uniformly by tokens. Some users received official emails revealing that OpenAI will test the integration of Chat and Work on a small scale in the coming weeks.

It is worth noting that Anthropic had already integrated Claude's chat and Cowork functions as early as September this year. The two companies are advancing similar Agent product experiences.

OpenAI's recent adjustments have a lot of overlaps with Cat Wu's previous work at Anthropic.

In her joining statement, Cat Wu specifically mentioned OpenAI's user scale. She said that she appreciates that OpenAI has brought AI to more than one billion users, and looks forward to working with the new team to develop Agents that can help individuals and teams get work done, while allowing users to retain control.

As programming Agents expand to daily work and team collaboration scenarios, the product layouts of OpenAI and Anthropic are getting closer and closer, and the enterprise market has become an important area of competition for both sides.

On November 5, according to foreign media reports, OpenAI President Greg Brockman revealed that enterprise customers now contribute more than half of the company's revenue.

As for whether this job change was initiated by OpenAI's active poaching, how long the two sides have been in contact, and what kind of compensation and equity treatment Cat Wu has received, there is no public information at present.

On the Eve of Listing, They Don't Want the Money Anymore?  

Anthropic is sprinting towards a trillion-dollar valuation, and choosing to leave at this time makes people wonder: don't they want to wait for the IPO to cash in their wealth?

On November 2, Anthropic updated its IPO prospectus. According to the latest reports, some investors suggested setting its IPO valuation at 1.5 to 1.6 trillion US dollars, a reduction of about 20% to 25% from the previous 2 trillion US dollar expectation.

Even after shrinking by hundreds of billions of dollars, this is still an astronomical figure. But Cat Wu and others don't seem to be in a hurry to wait for the IPO day.

In fact, leaving Anthropic does not necessarily mean giving up the benefits brought by the IPO. In Silicon Valley tech companies, equity incentives are often an important part of employee compensation. For employees who joined the company early, as the company's valuation rises, the value of this part of assets may far exceed their salaries.

According to the latest prospectus, the equity incentives issued by