OpenAI Hires Claude Code Lead Cat Wu

OpenAI hired Cat Wu, formerly Claude Code’s product lead at Anthropic, on the 5th local time to oversee product management in its Core Products organization. Business Insider reported the hire, which OpenAI also confirmed. On X, Wu praised OpenAI for bringing AI to more than 1 billion people and making products central to its mission. She said she would build AI agents that support users and teams while keeping people in control.

At Anthropic, Wu led Claude Code’s product strategy, user experience, and commercialization. She worked with Boris Cherny, the engineer who led its early development, and helped grow Claude Code from an internal experimental tool into a service used by many developers. Wu said she saw the potential of AI coding agents after directing Claude Code to build a reinforcement learning environment without writing the code herself. Claude Code, released as a research preview in February last year, later developed into an agent that edits and tests code and handles complex software tasks.

Wu focused on quickly bringing models’ new capabilities into products and improving features so developers could delegate more work to AI. She also helped develop Cowork, a general office automation tool that extends agents into knowledge work such as writing documents, analyzing materials, and managing projects. In a TechCrunch interview last May, she predicted that agents would move beyond waiting for requests to identify and perform needed tasks. She said products should rapidly incorporate models’ new capabilities rather than fix long-term plans around current technical constraints.

At OpenAI, Wu will report to Core Products lead Thibault Sottiaux and work with enterprise product lead Nick Turley and consumer product lead Ashley Alexander, among others. She is expected to be involved in ChatGPT and enterprise AI products as well as Codex. OpenAI is pursuing the acquisition of software repository and management technology company Pierre Computer Company as it expands Codex into a platform for managing software development more broadly.

Wu studied computer science at Princeton University, then worked as an engineer at Scale AI and data engineering startup Dagster. After serving as a partner at Index Ventures, she joined Anthropic in August 2024. In July last year, she moved with Boris Cherny to Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, but returned to Anthropic about two weeks later. At Anthropic, Claude Code team member Tariq Shihipar left last month, while growth marketing lead Austin Lau was also reported to have moved to OpenAI.

OpenAI hired Cat Wu, formerly Claude Code’s product lead at Anthropic, on the 5th local time to oversee product management in its Core Products organization. Business Insider reported the hire, which OpenAI also confirmed. On X, Wu praised OpenAI for bringing AI to more than 1 billion people and making products central to its mission. She said she would build AI agents that support users and teams while keeping people in control.

At Anthropic, Wu led Claude Code’s product strategy, user experience, and commercialization. She worked with Boris Cherny, the engineer who led its early development, and helped grow Claude Code from an internal experimental tool into a service used by many developers. Wu said she saw the potential of AI coding agents after directing Claude Code to build a reinforcement learning environment without writing the code herself. Claude Code, released as a research preview in February last year, later developed into an agent that edits and tests code and handles complex software tasks.

Wu focused on quickly bringing models’ new capabilities into products and improving features so developers could delegate more work to AI. She also helped develop Cowork, a general office automation tool that extends agents into knowledge work such as writing documents, analyzing materials, and managing projects. In a TechCrunch interview last May, she predicted that agents would move beyond waiting for requests to identify and perform needed tasks. She said products should rapidly incorporate models’ new capabilities rather than fix long-term plans around current technical constraints.

At OpenAI, Wu will report to Core Products lead Thibault Sottiaux and work with enterprise product lead Nick Turley and consumer product lead Ashley Alexander, among others. She is expected to be involved in ChatGPT and enterprise AI products as well as Codex. OpenAI is pursuing the acquisition of software repository and management technology company Pierre Computer Company as it expands Codex into a platform for managing software development more broadly.

Wu studied computer science at Princeton University, then worked as an engineer at Scale AI and data engineering startup Dagster. After serving as a partner at Index Ventures, she joined Anthropic in August 2024. In July last year, she moved with Boris Cherny to Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, but returned to Anthropic about two weeks later. At Anthropic, Claude Code team member Tariq Shihipar left last month, while growth marketing lead Austin Lau was also reported to have moved to OpenAI.