Anthropic has lost Catherine Wu, the product lead behind Claude Code, to OpenAI. She’s now heading product management for OpenAI’s “Core Products” — a role that includes Codex and ChatGPT, effective immediately, per The Decoder’s report published Tuesday at 12:20 p.m. ET. Her departure follows a broader exodus: growth marketing manager Austin Lau is also moving from Anthropic to OpenAI.
Two other key Claude Code contributors, skills and context engineer Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris, who built Claude Code Desktop, have left Anthropic too, though neither has joined OpenAI as of the report’s publication. The Decoder notes Wu joined Anthropic two years ago, when Claude Code was still an internal tool requiring manual permission for every action.
Today, it runs autonomously across large code migrations and product builds, a shift she attributes to growing user trust in its judgment. At OpenAI, she says her goal is to build agents that “take work off users’ plates while keeping them in control.” That phrasing echoes OpenAI’s public stance on agent autonomy, but also highlights a strategic pivot: Anthropic’s flagship AI coding tool is now being shaped, in part, by people who helped build it elsewhere.
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