Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu Leaves Anthropic as Company Prepares to List

According to Sina Tech, Wu decided which features Claude Code prioritised and when they were released, while Boris Cherny, the tool's creator, led engineering. She also led product for Cowork, Anthropic's desktop agent. Sina reported that she joined Anthropic in August 2024 as a product manager on the research team and later moved to Claude Code. Before that she worked as a product engineer at Scale AI and Dagster, and in venture capital.

In her post, Wu recalled using Claude Code about two years ago, when it was a small internal tool, to build a reinforcement learning environment. She said she directed it for tens of hours without writing any code herself. She compared those early days, when most users approved each permission request by hand, with today, when the default is to let Claude approve actions on its own judgment and it carries out large migrations and builds new products. She thanked the Claude Code, Cowork and Tag teams. The reports did not give a reason for her departure or say where she is going next.

This is not the first time she has left. In July 2025, Wu and Cherny joined Anysphere, the maker of the Cursor code editor, and returned to Anthropic about two weeks later.

Two other prominent Claude Code figures, Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris, both announced on October 24 that they were leaving, Sina reported. Morris was described as the creator of the Claude Code desktop app. The three departures come shortly after Anthropic publicly filed its IPO prospectus, which Sina dated to October 26. None of the reports reviewed includes an Anthropic comment on the departures.