THE SHORT VERSION

Cat Wu, who ran Claude Code, quit weeks before Anthropic's IPO

Satirical cartoon: a woman carrying a box of desk belongings walks out of an office while a CLAUDE CODE machine stamps a paper AUTO-APPROVED, and workers prepare a large IPO bell in the background. — Machine Age Cartoon · Zimbo

Cat Wu announced on X on November 3 that she had left Anthropic, where she served as head of product for Claude Code, closing a two-year stretch in which the coding tool moved from an internal experiment toward more autonomous software development.

Wu joined Anthropic in August 2024 as a product manager on the Research PM team, after working as a product engineer at Scale AI and Dagster and then as a venture capitalist; she thanked the Claude Code, Cowork and Tag teams and called building Claude Code into an industry-defining product the journey of a lifetime.

Her departure comes weeks ahead of Anthropic's planned public listing later this month and follows fellow Claude Code team member Thariq Shihipar's departure last month; Anthropic confirmed the exit, and Wu gave no reason for leaving — answering one well-wisher's vacation question with “post agi!”