Cat Wu, product head for Claude Code, leaves Anthropic ahead of its IPO

A familiar face walks out

Cat Wu, the head of product for Claude Code at Anthropic, has left the company, as Business Insider reported. She left on Friday and posted about it on X on Tuesday afternoon, thanking the Claude Code team and its users and looking back on how far the tool has come. Anthropic confirmed the departure.

Wu did not say what led to her decision, and she did not immediately answer the outlet's requests for comment. Anthropic has not offered an explanation either. Any story about why she left would therefore be guesswork.

Claude Code is an AI tool that can carry out programming tasks on its own, rather than just suggesting a line or two. Wu was one of its two top leaders and public advocates, alongside its original creator, Boris Cherny.

From prototype to flagship product

Wu joined Anthropic in summer 2024 and tested an early prototype of what became Claude Code. In her Tuesday post she summed up that first experience in one line: "It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team."

Anthropic released the tool as a research preview in February 2025, announcing it with a short demo video that featured both Wu and Cherny. The two briefly left for Cursor, an AI coding startup, that summer and returned to Anthropic a couple of weeks later, according to The Information, which Business Insider cited.

Usage then picked up sharply toward the end of 2025. The tool first caught on with software engineers, who suddenly had something that could work through whole coding tasks. As more developers used it, big tech companies' AI bills with Anthropic climbed, because those bills grow with the volume of text the model processes, measured in units called tokens.

Business Insider describes Claude Code as the viral product Anthropic needed. It helped lift revenue, paid for more computing power, and made the company a stronger rival to OpenAI.

What Wu actually did

Product management can sound vague, so the details help. In an April interview on Lenny's Podcast, Wu described her job as working out how to move Claude Code toward the far more capable version Cherny imagines. That vision assumes AI will eventually reach artificial general intelligence, a term for AI that matches people across a wide range of work.

Day to day, she worked with the marketing, sales and finance teams, and she hired some of Anthropic's product managers. She also replied to users' requests about Claude Code on social media, which made her an unusually visible link between the company and the people using its tools.

Wu also oversaw Cowork, Anthropic's tool for knowledge work outside of software engineering. It runs on the same AI models as Claude Code but is aimed at people who do not write code for a living.

The timing and the pattern

The exit lands at a sensitive moment. Business Insider says Anthropic is heading toward a very large initial public offering, the first sale of its shares to public investors, later this month. Companies in that window tend to draw extra attention to every senior change.

She is also not the only Claude Code team member to go recently. Thariq Shihipar, who also worked on the tool, announced his own departure last month. Two exits do not make a trend on their own, and the source gives no link between them.

Wu stayed in character on the way out. When a commenter asked on X whether she would now take a six-month vacation, she joked that a break would come after AGI arrives.

What it means if you use Claude Code

For most users nothing changes today. The product is still there, and the team behind it is still working. What has changed is that Claude Code's roadmap now rests on a team without one of its best-known champions.

For developers and small businesses, the sensible response is modest. Watch the next few product updates for any change in speed or direction, and avoid building a critical workflow around a single feature that has not been formally announced.

For students and job seekers, a senior exit before a major IPO can reflect pressure inside a fast-growing company, or simply a person ready to move on. It also leaves a gap, and product and developer-tools roles at Anthropic are worth watching, though the source does not say the company is hiring for them.