OpenAI hired the person who made its rival's best product — and the timing could hardly be worse for Anthropic.
Cat Wu, Anthropic's head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, announced on X on Wednesday that she is joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products, according to State of AI. Her last day at Anthropic was Friday, October 30; she announced her departure on Tuesday and named her destination a day later. OpenAI confirmed the hire to Business Insider, which first reported the move; Anthropic declined to comment.
Wu will report to Thibault "Tibo" Sottiaux, an OpenAI representative said. The Core Products group covers ChatGPT, Codex, the API, and OpenAI's agent infrastructure, according to RuntimeWire. In other words, Wu is going from running the product that made Anthropic a serious enterprise rival to running product for the tools built to beat it.
The hire lands weeks before Anthropic's planned IPO — the company filed its S-1 on October 26 and is expected to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT before the end of November — and Claude Code is the centerpiece of the pitch. Wu was one of its two public faces, alongside creator Boris Cherny. She is also the latest of several Claude Code departures in recent weeks: engineers Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris both announced their exits on October 24. Anthropic has not said who now leads product for Claude Code.
There is a twist in Wu's own telling. In her farewell post she noted that when Claude Code launched, users approved every permission prompt by hand; today the default is letting Claude approve its own actions. Her OpenAI announcement leans the other way: "Together, we'll build agents that have your back and your team's, and keep you in control." She also praised OpenAI for "showing the world that scaling works" and bringing AI "to over a billion people."
This is not Wu's first defection — she and Cherny briefly left Anthropic for Cursor in the summer of 2025 before boomeranging back weeks later, The Information reported. The same day, OpenAI agreed to acquire Pierre, the startup whose Git tooling already runs inside Codex. OpenAI is assembling the coding-agent stack piece by piece — and now it has the product leader who proved the category could sell. The question for Anthropic's roadshow is whether investors see one departure or the start of an exodus.
— via State of AI