Cat Wu, the product chief behind Claude Code, has left Anthropic weeks before its IPO

Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code and one of the best-known faces of its hit coding tool, has left the company. “Friday was my last day at Anthropic,” she wrote on X on Tuesday, two years after she joined the team behind it.

Anthropic confirmed the departure to Business Insider, which reported it first. Wu didn’t say why she was leaving or where she is going next, and Anthropic hasn’t said who will take over her role. When one reply asked whether she would now take six months off, she answered: “post agi!”

“It worked, I was hooked”

Wu joined Anthropic in the summer of 2024, when Claude Code was still a small internal tool. In her farewell post she said she asked it to build a reinforcement learning environment and steered it “for tens of hours” without writing a line of code herself. That was enough to win her over:

Friday was my last day at Anthropic.

Two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, I asked it to build an RL env. I steered it for tens of hours but never manually wrote a line of code. It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team.

When we first launched, most people approved every permission prompt by hand and mostly used Claude to answer questions and write tests.

Today, the default is trusting Claude's judgment to auto-approve. Claude does large migrations and builds new products.

Helping build Claude Code into an industry-defining product has been the journey of a lifetime.

Thank you to the incredible team behind Claude Code, Cowork, and Tag. These products are the sum of thousands of great ideas from you. I'll miss working with you all.

Thank you to our users for embracing a new way of working. Your constant feedback shaped so much of what we shipped and your stories made the work so meaningful.

Excited to see what you all make next!

— cat (@_catwu) November 3, 2026

Anthropic released Claude Code as a research preview in February 2025, announcing it with a short demo video fronted by Wu and Boris Cherny, the engineer who created it. The pair led the product together from then on, apart from a brief detour in the summer of 2025, when both moved to Anysphere, the company behind the rival coding app Cursor, and returned to Anthropic within weeks, as The Information reported at the time.

From a terminal tool to the default way to code

Under Wu and Cherny, Claude Code became one of the most successful AI products yet. It started as a way for software engineers to hand whole programming tasks to Claude from the command line, and its usage drove a surge in the tokens developers and companies bought from Anthropic. Wu also oversaw Cowork, which brings the same agent to non-coding office work, and her post thanked the team behind Tag, Claude’s Slack app.

Her farewell sums up how far the tool moved in two years. At launch, she wrote, most people approved every permission prompt by hand and mostly asked Claude questions or had it write tests. Now the default is to let Claude decide what to approve, a shift that has not been painless: a developer said last month that Opus 5.5 wiped his entire C: drive, and Anthropic pointed to auto mode, the classifier that screens risky actions, as the answer. The proactive Claude Duet app pushes the same idea further, messaging users first and working while they are away.

The third Claude Code exit in two weeks

Wu is not the only member of the team to go. Thariq Shihipar, another prominent Claude Code engineer, announced on October 24 that he had left after more than a year, and said he planned to take a break before starting something new. Neither he nor Wu gave a reason.

The timing is awkward for Anthropic. It filed publicly for a Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT on October 26, and an amended prospectus on Monday showed it took in nearly $17 billion in the three months to September. Business Insider says the listing is expected later this month. Coding is central to that pitch, so investors are likely to watch who now runs the product.

Why it matters

Claude Code is the product that turned Anthropic into a serious rival to OpenAI, and Wu was one of the two people most closely tied to it. Losing her weeks before the biggest test of Anthropic’s value puts pressure on the company to show the product’s momentum does not depend on a handful of names.

Sources: Cat Wu on X; Business Insider.