Cat Wu, head of product for Anthropic’s Claude Code, has left the company to join OpenAI as head of product management for its Core Products team — the unit behind Codex, OpenAI’s AI coding assistant. She announced the move on X on Wednesday, 5 November 2026, one day after confirming her departure from Anthropic.
Her last day at Anthropic was Friday, 1 November. OpenAI confirmed the hire to Business Insider. Anthropic declined to comment. Wu will report to Thibault Sottiaux, who leads Core Products, and work alongside Nick Turley (enterprise) and Ashley Alexander (consumer).
Sottiaux and OpenAI president Greg Brockman both welcomed her publicly on X. Wu joined Anthropic in August 2024 as a research product manager and rose to lead Claude Code, a tool she described in May 2026 as now auto-approving large migrations and new product builds. Before Anthropic, she was a product engineer at Scale AI and Dagster, then a partner at Index Ventures.
Her departure follows that of Thariq Shihipar, another Claude Code contributor, who left Anthropic in October. Wu said selling IPO shares early “wasn’t a factor”, though Anthropic’s amended filing, due later this month, shows $17bn in revenue and positions the company for a public listing. The move lands amid growing public comparison between Claude Code and Codex, with search trends showing rising interest in ‘Claude Code vs Codex’ and ‘Claude Code AI’.
OpenAI’s Codex has expanded beyond developers since June, when it acquired Ona to run AI agents inside customer cloud environments. Wu’s hiring signals OpenAI’s push to harden Codex’s product discipline, especially as Anthropic prepares to go public and faces scrutiny over how its tools handle real-world engineering workflows. She starts at OpenAI next week.
TBFiled by The Tech Business Desk
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