Claude Code product lead Catherine Wu leaves Anthropic for OpenAI
Catherine Wu, who led product management for Claude Code at Anthropic, is moving to OpenAI into a role leading product management for Core Products. Growth marketing manager Austin Lau is also leaving Anthropic.
Catherine Wu, the former head of product management for Claude Code at Anthropic, is moving to OpenAI, where she will lead product management for an area called "Core Products". Codex and ChatGPT lead Thibault Sottiaux welcomed her with a short comment, "CatGPT". According to her own words, Wu joined Anthropic two years ago, when the Claude Code tool was still a small internal project and users manually approved almost every permission; today, she says, it is common to trust the judgment of the Claude model, which can handle even large-scale migrations and the building of new products. Wu stated that in her new role she wants to build agents that take work off users' hands while still leaving them in control.
Along with her, Austin Lau, who was in charge of growth marketing at Anthropic, is also moving from Anthropic to OpenAI. Anthropic has also recently lost Thariq Shihipar (skills and context engineer) and Anthony Morris, who created Claude Code Desktop — however, for these two the source does not state that they moved to OpenAI.
Why it matters
The departure of key people behind Claude Code to rival company OpenAI shows how intensely major AI labs are poaching talent in product leadership and marketing, not just in model development. For the market, this signals that the competition between Anthropic and OpenAI is also playing out at the level of the people who shape the strategy and direction of agentic products.
Relevant practical impact
What this means
For a business
Anthropic is losing several key people from the Claude Code team in a short period of time (product lead, growth marketing manager, context engineer, creator of the desktop version), signaling increased talent turnover among leading AI companies and a potential risk to the continuity of Claude Code's product strategy.
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Event sources
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