Claude Code head of product Cat Wu leaves Anthropic

Cat Wu, Claude Code’s head of product, left Anthropic on October 30, Business Insider reports, and the company has confirmed she is gone. She and Boris Cherny, who created the tool, were Claude Code’s two top leaders. Wu also oversees Cowork, Anthropic’s tool for non-coding work, which runs on the same models.

Wu posted about leaving on X on November 3. She thanked the Claude Code team and its users and looked back on how far the tool had come, but gave no reason for going. Thariq Shihipar, who also worked on Claude Code, announced his own exit in October.

Her departure comes just before Anthropic’s IPO, planned for later this month. Zacks and Investor’s Business Daily report that the road show could start the week of November 9, with the listing following within two weeks.

Wu joined Anthropic in summer 2024 after trying an early Claude Code prototype. “It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team,” she wrote in Tuesday’s post. When Anthropic released the tool as a research preview in February 2025, she appeared with Cherny in the short demo video that announced it. That summer the two left for the AI coding startup Cursor and came back to Anthropic a couple of weeks later, The Information reported.

On Lenny’s Podcast in April, Wu described her job as working out how to get Claude Code to the “AGI-pilled” version Cherny had in mind for its future. She said she worked with marketing, sales, finance and other teams, and that she hired some of Anthropic’s product managers. She also answered users’ Claude Code requests on social media herself, and Anthropic’s oral history of the tool, based on interviews recorded between February and May 2026, lists her as head of product.

Under her farewell post, one commenter asked whether she would now take that six-month vacation. Wu replied: “post agi!”