Cat Wu announced on X on November 5 that Wu is joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products. Wu was previously the product lead for Claude Code at Anthropic; multiple reports put the last working day at October 30, so less than a week passed between the departure and the new employer being named.
The reporting line at the new job is fairly clear. Citing confirmation from OpenAI, reports say Wu will report to Thibault Sottiaux and work with Nick Turley, who runs enterprise products, and Ashley Alexander, who runs consumer products. OpenAI president Greg Brockman also publicly welcomed Wu. Sottiaux reshared the post with a single word: CatGPT.
Wu's announcement did not mention Anthropic and focused on agent products:
“Together, we'll build agents that have your back and your team's, and keep you in control, so you get more time for the people and work you love.”
The same post noted that OpenAI has already brought AI to more than a billion people and said good products are central to the company's mission. It named no specific product and gave no start-date details.
A path from research products to Claude Code
Put Wu's last two years together and this departure has a backstory.
Wu joined Anthropic in August 2024, initially managing research-oriented products, after earlier stints at Scale AI and Dagster. Claude Code launched as a research preview in February 2025, and from then on Wu and engineering lead Boris Cherny became the pair most often mentioned together outside the company.
There was a brief exit in July 2025: the two went to Anysphere, the parent company of Cursor, and returned to Anthropic about two weeks later. The episode at least shows that core members of the Claude Code team had long been on competitors' lists.
After returning to Anthropic, Wu's remit kept growing, covering Cowork, aimed at non-programmers, and Claude Tag, an agent product. In February this year, Anthropic said Claude Code's annualized revenue had passed $2.5 billion.
At least three names in eight days
Wu is not the only one to leave in this round. Public reports name two others: Anthony Morris, creator of the Claude Code desktop client, who stepped down on October 23, and core engineer Thariq Shihipar, who announced his departure on October 24. With Wu, that makes three people gone in the eight days from October 23 to 30.
All three farewells praised Anthropic, none included public criticism, and none gave a specific reason. Cherny reportedly remains at Anthropic.
The timing invites speculation. Anthropic's prospectus was updated on November 2, and the company is at a key stage ahead of going public. But there is currently no public basis to link the departures to the IPO schedule or equity arrangements, and none of the three has addressed it, so that angle has to be set aside for now.
The product portfolios on both sides
The prospectus offers a set of figures on how much Claude Code matters to Anthropic: in the third quarter this year, enterprise customers not using Claude Code spent less than $75 a month on average, while the top 5% of enterprise customers by Claude Code spending averaged about 20 times that amount per month.
On OpenAI's side, Codex had more than 5 million weekly active users in June, about 20% of whom were not developers. At DevDay on September 29, the company said Codex and ChatGPT Work together had more than 35 million weekly active users. Brockman has also said enterprise customers already contribute more than half of OpenAI's revenue.
Judging by the reporting line, Wu's counterparts span both the enterprise and consumer sides, and the job title does not mention Codex. So the claim that a Claude Code person is going to work on Codex is still only speculation; OpenAI has not disclosed which products Wu will oversee.
What is still unknown
Whether OpenAI actively recruited Wu, how long the talks lasted, and what the compensation and equity terms are have not been made public. Some reports say Anthropic declined to comment, and we found no public information on who will take over Claude Code's product line.
Wu's post ends with “Please keep your feedback coming,” still the habit of someone who builds products. For Claude Code users, the next things to watch are probably two: how soon Anthropic names a new product lead, and when traces of Wu's work begin to show up in OpenAI's agent products.
Sources: Cat Wu's public post, 36Kr, CocoLoop, related Business Insider coverage; enterprise spending and weekly-active-user figures are drawn from media summaries of the prospectus and DevDay.