Cat Wu, a top product manager at Anthropic and one of a small group behind the launch of its blockbuster tool Claude Code, left the company on Friday.
Wu announced her departure on Tuesday afternoon on X, thanking the Claude Code team and its users and reflecting on the tool’s progress. As the head of product for Claude Code, Wu served as one of the two top leaders and evangelists for the technology alongside its original creator, Boris Cherny.
Claude Code, under Wu and Cherny’s leadership, turned into one of the most important products in the AI industry’s history. The tech gave Anthropic the viral product it needed to boost its revenues and access more funding for compute, and it turned the company into a bigger rival for OpenAI.
Wu did not say what prompted her departure and did not immediately respond to requests for comment. She’s leaving at a crucial moment for Anthropic, as it churns toward a gargantuan initial public offering later this month. The company confirmed her departure. Thariq Shihipar, who also worked on Claude Code, announced his own departure last month.
Wu joined Anthropic in summer 2024 and tested an early prototype of Claude Code. In Tuesday’s post, she reminisced on that moment: “It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team.”
Anthropic released the tool in research preview in February 2025, announcing it in a brief demo video that featured Wu and Cherny.
The two decamped to AI coding startup Cursor that summer, and then returned to Anthropic a couple of weeks later, The Information reported.
Wu and Cherny then oversaw Claude Code’s meteoric rise, which ramped up at the end of 2025. The tool first grew popular as an automatic coder for software engineers, who suddenly had a product that could sprint through entire coding tasks. Tech giants’ AI bills with Anthropic soared as more developers started burning through Claude tokens.
Wu also oversees Cowork, Anthropic’s tool for non-coding work, which relies on the same AI models and handles knowledge work for non-software engineers.
In an interview on Lenny’s Podcast in April, Wu described her role as figuring out the path to bring Claude Code to the “AGI-pilled” version that Cherny envisioned for the future — a reference to the industry term “artificial general intelligence.”
In her role, Wu said she worked with marketing, sales, finance, and other teams, and hired some of Anthropic’s product managers. She also regularly responded to user requests about Claude Code on social media.
One commenter wrote under her X post on Tuesday, “Are you gonna take that 6 months vacations now?”
Wu answered: “post agi!”
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