Cat Wu, a face of the blockbuster app Claude Code, leaves Anthropic

Cat Wu, a top merchandise director at Anthropic and one of a small collection rearward the initiate of its blockbuster tool Claude Code, remaining the business on Friday.

Wu announced her departure on Tuesday midday on X, thanking the Claude Code squad and its users and reflecting on the tool's progress. As the caput of merchandise for Claude Code, Wu served as among the two top leaders and evangelists for the innovation alongside its first creator, Boris Cherny.

Claude Code, under Wu and Cherny's leadership, turned into among the most crucial products in the AI industry's history. The tech gave Anthropic the viral merchandise it needed to boost its revenues and admission additional backing for compute, and it turned the business into a bigger competitor for OpenAI.

Wu did not say what prompted her departure and did not immediately react to requests for comment. She's leaving at a crucial instant for Anthropic, as it churns toward a gargantuan initial community offering afterward this month. The business confirmed her departure. Thariq Shihipar, who additionally worked on Claude Code, announced his own departure final month.

Wu joined Anthropic in summer 2024 and tested an first prototype of Claude Code. In Tuesday's post, she reminisced on that moment: "It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team."

Anthropic released the tool in investigation preview in February 2025, announcing it in a concise demo video that featured Wu and Cherny.

The two decamped to AI coding startup Cursor that summer, and afterward returned to Anthropic a brace of weeks later, The Information reported.

Wu and Cherny afterward oversaw Claude Code's meteoric rise, which ramped up at the end of 2025. The tool archetypal grew famous as an automatic coder for application engineers, who abruptly had a merchandise that could sprint through complete coding tasks. Tech giants' AI bills alongside Anthropic soared as additional developers started burning through Claude tokens.

Wu additionally oversees Cowork, Anthropic's tool for non-coding work, which relies on the identical AI models and handles cognition activity for non-software engineers.

In an discussion on Lenny's Podcast in April, Wu described her function as figuring out the way to bring Claude Code to the "AGI-pilled" type that Cherny envisioned for the forthcoming — a citation to the industry term "artificial broad intelligence."

In her role, Wu stated she worked alongside marketing, sales, finance, and another teams, and hired several of Anthropic's merchandise managers. She additionally regularly responded to person requests concerning Claude Code on social media.

One commenter wrote under her X article on Tuesday, "Are you gonna obtain that 6 months vacations now?"

Wu answered: "post agi!"

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