Product lead since its early days leaves
Cat Wu, who served as product lead for Anthropic's AI coding tool "Claude Code," has left the company. She announced on X on Nov. 3 (Nov. 4 Japan time), "Friday was my last day at Anthropic." Her last day was Friday, Oct. 30. According to Business Insider, Anthropic confirmed her departure. Wu did not disclose the reason for leaving or her next employer.
Friday was my last day at Anthropic. Two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, I asked it to build an RL env. … Thank you to the incredible team behind Claude Code, Cowork, and Tag. Thank you to our users for embracing a new way of working. … Excited to see what you all make next!
Wu joined in August 2024 and moved to the Claude Code team after working in product for the research division. Before joining, she was an engineer at Scale AI and Dagster, and later worked in venture capital. Business Insider describes Wu as one of a small group, including developer Boris Cherny, that launched Claude Code. When Anthropic released Claude Code as a research preview in February 2025, she appeared in the introductory video with Cherny.
Besides Claude Code, she also oversaw "Cowork," which handles office tasks other than programming. According to Business Insider, she worked with the marketing, sales and finance departments and also handled hiring of product staff. "Tag," which she thanked in her post, is a Claude feature used inside the business chat app Slack.
3 key members leave in 2 weeks
Key members of Claude Code had already been leaving before Wu. Thariq Shihipar, who worked on its development for more than a year, announced his departure on X on Oct. 23 (Oct. 24 Japan time). Anthony Morris, who built the desktop version of Claude Code, also announced his departure on Oct. 24, with Oct. 23 as his last day. China's Sina reported that three central figures of Claude Code had left in less than two weeks.
I've left Anthropic after more than a year of working on Claude Code and seeing it scale larger than I ever imagined.
Shihipar said he would take a short break before starting something new, and Morris said he would announce his next job soon. None of the three disclosed the reasons for leaving, and it is not known whether the departures are related.
Wu has also left Anthropic once before. According to The Information, in July 2025 she moved with Cherny to Anysphere, which runs the AI-powered development environment "Cursor," and returned to Anthropic after about two weeks.
- Wu and Cherny move to Anysphere, return after about 2 weeksReport
- Shihipar announces departure; same day is Morris' last dayOfficial
- Anthropic makes its IPO registration statement (S-1) publicOfficial
- Wu's last dayOfficial
- Wu announces her departure on XOfficial
- Expected IPO (The Wall Street Journal)Report
IPO expected week of Nov. 16, Claude Code drove growth
On Oct. 26, Anthropic made public its registration statement (S-1) for listing on the Nasdaq. According to The Wall Street Journal, the IPO is expected in the week of Nov. 16 and could raise more than $100 billion. According to the registration statement, revenue for January-June 2026 was $16.3 billion.
Claude Code is the product that has driven that growth. According to Anthropic's announcements, Claude Code's annualized revenue exceeded $500 million in September 2025 and reached $1 billion in December. In February 2026, it exceeded $2.5 billion, more than doubling since the start of the year.
Business Insider reported that the departure comes at a critical time ahead of the IPO. Anthropic has not announced a successor.
Wu sums up the change as auto-approve becoming the norm
In her departure post, Wu looked back on how the way Claude Code is used has changed. When it first launched, she said, most users manually approved each of the AI's actions one by one and mainly used it to answer questions and write tests. Now, she said, it has become standard to leave it to Claude's judgment and approve automatically. The post had been viewed about 960,000 times by Nov. 4.
