OpenAI Hires Anthropic's Claude Code Product Lead Cat Wu

Wu announced the move in a post on X that opened, "Some news: I'm joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products!" according to RuntimeWire. Business Insider also reported that OpenAI had hired a top Anthropic product leader. She will join the organisation led by Thibault Sottiaux, which RuntimeWire said is responsible for ChatGPT, Codex, the API and agent infrastructure. Reports put her last day at Anthropic as October 30.

The hire takes one of the people most closely tied to Anthropic's fastest-growing product to the rival it competes with most directly. Claude Code, Anthropic's command-line coding agent, became one of the company's main revenue drivers and a direct challenge to OpenAI's Codex. Wu joined Anthropic in August 2024 and worked closely with Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, as it grew from an internal tool into a product. She was later also product lead for Cowork, Anthropic's agent for non-coding office work.

In her post Wu said she wants to build agents that "keep you in control, so you get more time for the people and work you love," according to RuntimeWire. Crypto Briefing reported that her focus at OpenAI will be developing reliable agents.

The departure is not the only recent one from the Claude Code team. Crypto Briefing reported that Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris have also left. Anthropic has not commented publicly on Wu's move.

The timing matters for Anthropic, which is weeks away from its planned initial public offering. Investors are likely to look closely at whether the company can keep the product leaders behind its coding business, which competes with OpenAI, Google and a growing group of start-ups for the same enterprise customers. Before Anthropic, Wu worked at Scale AI, Dagster and Index Ventures.