Anthropic's Claude Code chief jumped to OpenAI — weeks before the IPO

Catherine “Cat” Wu, who spent two years at Anthropic and became head of product for Claude Code, announced on November 5 that she is joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products. She praised OpenAI for proving that scaling works and bringing AI to more than a billion people, and said she looks forward to building agents that keep users in control.

The timing is the story: Wu leaves weeks before Anthropic's IPO roadshow, and she is the third person closely tied to Claude Code to walk out in as many weeks — engineers Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris announced their departures days earlier. Claude Code is central to Anthropic's pitch to investors, and OpenAI's Codex is its closest rival.