Cat Wu joins OpenAI from Anthropic in huge product-lead coup

Cat Wu, who remaining Anthropic final week following becoming among the company's highest-profile merchandise managers, is joining OpenAI. She announced the news on X.

Poaching Wu from its archrival is a important coup for OpenAI. Wu was the merchandise chief for Claude Code and had rotate into among the blockbuster app's notable evangelists on social media. She oversaw the tool's increase from an inner prototype to a business juggernaut that has bolstered the two Anthropic's finances and the day-to-day activity of application engineers.

Now, she'll assistance Anthropic's elder rival, foremost merchandise administration for OpenAI's center products team. She wrote in the notice article that she has "a lot of regard for OpenAI" and cited its broad attain of complete 1 milliard users.

OpenAI's Codex, a tool akin to Claude Code, has boosted the company's growth and, additional recently, has increasingly been pointed at non-technical work. AI models' coding abilities and their capability to grip long-term tasks are now chief to the industry's expanding ambitions.

Wu announced her departure from Anthropic on Tuesday, penning that she'd remaining final week and thanking Claude Code's squad and person base. The exit arrived fair a brace of weeks before Anthropic's planned initial community offering, as the startup pitches its financials to investors and tries to coast up its growth narrative.

OpenAI confirmed that Wu is joining the company. Anthropic declined to comment.

On X, Wu wrote that she had "no idea" if leaving would authorize her to market her shares before than remaining employees, and stated it "wasn't a aspect for me."

She additionally wrote rear to a inquiry concerning whether she'd be taking period off alongside the response, "post agi!," a citation to the industry goal of "artificial broad intelligence."

Her article on Wednesday, announcing her move to OpenAI, said, "we'll build agents that have your rear and your team's, and keep you in control, so you get additional period for the group and activity you love."

This isn't the archetypal period Wu remaining Anthropic for a competitor since joining in summer 2024. She and Claude Code creator Boris Cherny departed for AI coding startup Cursor in 2025, but quickly boomeranged to Anthropic, The Information reported at the time.

She and Cherny led Claude Code's fast increase delayed that twelvemonth and into 2026, buoyed by new AI example capabilities for code-writing work. Software developers flocked to the tool, and eventually to OpenAI's version, Codex, as improvements enabled them to automate additional and additional of the coding process.

Wu did not react to a petition for comment. Before Anthropic, she worked as a partner at Index Ventures, which would eventually co-lead Anthropic's September 2025 backing round.

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