Abstract:
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic has made a major personnel change as it prepares for a massive initial public offering (IPO). Cat Wu, the long-time senior product owner responsible for Claude Code's product efforts, has officially left the company. After the news was announced, the industry focused on the future product strategy and management stability of this AI unicorn.
Cat Wu announced her resignation on the social platform X on November 3, local time. In her post, she thanked the Claude Code team and users, and reviewed the product development process, but did not disclose the specific reasons for leaving. Anthropic later confirmed the news.
As the product leader of Claude Code, Cat Wu and Boris Cherny, the original author of the product, are regarded as the two most important core figures of the project. Under the leadership of the two, Claude Code has rapidly grown from an internal experimental project to one of the most influential products in the field of AI programming, and has also become an important weapon for Anthropic to challenge OpenAI's competitive position.
The report pointed out that the success of Claude Code not only helped Anthropic gain widespread attention, but also brought the company continued growth in revenue and more sufficient computing power financial support. Usage of Claude's model services continues to rise among large tech companies, and related spending is growing rapidly as more developers use it for software development work.
Cat Wu joined Anthropic in the summer of 2024 and was initially exposed to an early prototype version of Claude Code. She later recalled that after her first experience with the product, she was attracted by its capabilities and decided to join the team and participate in its development.
In February 2025, Anthropic officially released Claude Code as a research preview. At that time, the company showed the product to the outside world through a short demonstration video, starring Cat Wu and Boris Cherny.
In the summer of the same year, the two briefly left Anthropic to join the AI programming startup Cursor, but returned to Anthropic a few weeks later and continued to lead the development of Claude Code. Since then, the product has experienced explosive growth and became rapidly popular at the end of 2025.
Initially, the software engineer community became the main users of Claude Code. With the help of generative AI capabilities, this tool can automatically complete a large number of coding tasks and greatly improve development efficiency. As the scale of enterprise customers continues to expand, Claude Code has gradually become one of Anthropic's most important commercial products.
In addition to Claude Code, Cat Wu is also responsible for the Cowork project. This is an AI work assistant for non-software engineers. It is also based on Anthropic’s core model capabilities and mainly serves knowledge-based work scenarios.
In an interview with a podcast in April this year, Cat Wu said that her work goal is to push Claude Code towards the "AGI version" envisioned by Boris Cherny. AGI here refers to “artificial general intelligence,” or artificial intelligence systems that can demonstrate near-human-level capabilities across a wide range of tasks.
She said that her job not only involves product planning, but also requires collaboration with multiple departments such as marketing, sales, and finance, and is also responsible for recruiting some product managers. In the past period of time, she has also often responded directly to users’ feedback and suggestions on Claude Code through social media.
It is worth noting that this is not the only important turnover in the Claude Code team recently. Thariq Shihipar, another member involved in project development, announced his departure last month, making the outside world more concerned about the future stability of the team.
Cat Wu’s departure comes at a critical stage as Anthropic prepares to launch its IPO. The market generally believes that Claude Code is one of the important engines driving the company's growth, and whether the core management changes can be smoothly digested will become an important indicator for investors to observe the company.
Cat Wu has not yet elaborated on future plans. However, below the resignation announcement, some netizens teased whether she could finally take a long leave. In response, she said, "Let's wait until AGI is realized." This brought an industry-specific end to her Anthropic career.
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