Claude Code product lead Cat Wu joins OpenAI less than 27 hours after leaving Anthropic
量子位 · wechat · 2026-11-05
Cat Wu, product lead for Anthropic's flagship Claude Code, announced her departure with a heartfelt farewell post — then joined OpenAI within 27 hours, welcomed by president Greg Brockman to lead a core product line. Last year she had already left Anthropic once alongside Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code) for Cursor, only to reverse course after two weeks, prompting an awkward on-stage question to Cursor's CEO.
Wu's background spans engineering and VC: Princeton CS, engineer at Scale AI, Dagster Cloud team lead, then partner at Index Ventures — where she kept writing scripts to scout startups. She joined Anthropic in August 2024, got hooked after building an RL environment with Claude Code without writing a line of code, and paired with Cherny to launch Claude Code in February 2025, which briefly outshone Codex.
Anthropic's first growth marketing lead, Austin Lau, joined OpenAI the same day — and reported Anthropic wins on coffee, OpenAI on snacks.
Related event: Former Anthropic PM Cat Wu Joins OpenAI to Lead Core Products(29 posts)→
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