Who is Cat Wu? Claude Code product chief joins OpenAI days after quitting Anthropic

OpenAI has brought on Catherine Wu, one of Anthropic’s best-known product leaders, in a major hiring move that could boost its efforts to take on rival coding tool Claude Code, which she helped develop into a commercial success.

Wu, who left Anthropic last week, confirmed her move to OpenAI in a post on X on Wednesday. She will join the company's core products team, taking on a leadership role as OpenAI looks to expand the reach of its AI tools among both businesses and everyday users.

Catherine Wu played a central role in the development and growth of Claude Code, one of Anthropic's most successful products. She helped take the tool from an internal experiment to a widely adopted product that has changed how software developers approach their work.

Wu became one of Anthropic's best-known product managers through her work on Claude Code. She was among the key figures responsible for guiding the

product from its early development stages to commercial adoption.

Her role also extended beyond product management. Catherine Wu became a visible advocate for Claude Code on social media, helping build awareness around a tool that has become an important part of Anthropic's business.

She joined Anthropic in the summer of 2024 after working as a partner at venture capital firm Index Ventures. Index Ventures later co-led Anthropic's September 2025 funding round.

Interestingly, this was not her first departure from Anthropic. In 2025, Wu and Claude Code creator Boris Cherny left the company for AI coding startup Cursor before returning to Anthropic shortly afterwards, according to The Information.

Wu's appointment comes as OpenAI looks to strengthen Codex, its answer to Anthropic's Claude Code.

Both products have gained traction as AI models become increasingly capable of writing software, handling complex instructions and completing tasks with less human intervention.

OpenAI has also been expanding Codex beyond traditional software development, positioning it as a tool that can assist with a wider range of professional tasks.

Wu's experience building Claude Code could prove valuable as OpenAI tries to increase adoption of Codex, particularly in the enterprise market. The company had fallen behind Anthropic in enterprise sales earlier this year, making the competition for business customers increasingly important.

At OpenAI, Wu will work with Nick Turley on enterprise products and Ashley Alexander on consumer products. She will report to Tibo Sottiaux, according to an OpenAI representative.

Announcing her move, Wu said she had considerable respect for OpenAI and pointed to its reach of more than one billion users.

She also outlined her ambitions for the company's products, writing that the goal was to build AI agents that could support individuals and teams while allowing users to remain in control of their work.

The appointment follows her departure announcement on Tuesday, when she thanked the Claude Code team and its users.

Her exit comes at a particularly important time for Anthropic, which is preparing for a planned initial public offering (IPO). The company is presenting its financial performance and growth prospects to potential investors as it prepares for the listing.

Catherine Wu also addressed speculation about whether leaving Anthropic could allow her to sell her shares earlier than employees who remained with the company. She said the possibility was not a factor in her decision.

Sayantani Biswas is an assistant editor at Livemint with seven years of experience covering geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations and global power dynamics. She reports on Indian and international politics, including elections worldwide, and specialises in historically grounded analysis of contemporary conflicts and state decisions. She joined Mint in 2021, after covering politics at publications including The Telegraph. <br> She holds an MPhil in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University (2019), with a specialisation in postcolonial Latin American literature. Her research examined economic nationalism through Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. She also writes on political language, cultural memory and the long shadows of conflict. <br> Biswas grew up in Durgapur, an industrial town in West Bengal shaped by migration, which drew families from across India to the Durgapur Steel Plant. As the only child in a joint family, she spent years listening—almost obsessively—to her grandparents’ testimonies of struggle, fear and loss as they fled Bangladesh during the Partition of 1947. This formative exposure to lived historical memory later converged with her training in Comparative Literature, equipping her to analyse socio-economic structures and their reverberations. <br> Outside the newsroom, she gravitates towards cultural history and critical theory, returning often to texts such as Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. As a journalist, she is committed to accuracy, intellectual rigour and fairness, and believes political reporting demands not only clarity and speed, but historical depth, contextual precision, and a disciplined resistance to spectacle.

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