What she announced, and what the viral posts get wrong
The Chinese posts going around this week have Cat Wu taking over OpenAI's core products. Her own announcement is narrower: she is joining "to lead product management for Core Products".
Core Products is Tibo Sottiaux's group, and she reports to him, beside two other product leads: Nick Turley on enterprise products and Ashley Alexander on consumer ones. That's Business Insider's account, relayed by Sina, and OpenAI confirmed the hire to the same outlet.
Sottiaux answered her post four minutes later: "Welcome Cat. Stoked to be building together soon."
She posted on the afternoon of 4 November, Pacific time. Beijing was already at 08:25 on 5 November, the date Chinese outlets give.
Her last day at Anthropic
A Friday, as her goodbye post says.
Source: Cat Wu's post on leaving Anthropic (read November 5, 2026)
She says she has left
She thanked the team behind Claude Code, Cowork and Tag.
Source: Cat Wu's post on leaving Anthropic (read November 5, 2026)
She says she is joining OpenAI
Product management for Core Products.
Source: Cat Wu's post on joining OpenAI (read November 5, 2026)
Screenshots of X's own embed, taken the day this post went up, with times in UTC. Select a shot to open the whole post, which the embed cuts at Show more.
Her posts on permissions, and where Codex sits in her new job
In her goodbye post she recalls how she began on Claude Code: she had it build a reinforcement-learning environment and "steered it for tens of hours but never manually wrote a line of code". At launch, though, "most people approved every permission prompt by hand". Now "the default is trusting Claude's judgment to auto-approve."
Since version 2.1.283, Claude Code's permission-modes page says, interactive terminal and VS Code sessions start in auto mode on a supported model, unless an organization turns it off. A second model then approves routine actions, and only Manual mode still stops before most edits and commands.
Codex is part of her new job: Runtime Wire puts it in Core Products with ChatGPT, the API and agent infrastructure. BigGo calls Codex the most direct competitor to Claude Code. In June OpenAI counted more than five million Codex users a week, Unite.AI reports, up 400% from earlier in the year.
Together, we'll build agents that have your back and your team's, and keep you in control, so you get more time for the people and work you love.
Captured the same way. The lines on permission prompts quoted above come after Show more, in the full post on X.
She wasn't the only Claude Code builder to leave
Thariq Shihipar, who had worked on Claude Code for more than a year, posted his goodbye on 23 October. Anthony Morris, who built Claude Code on desktop, posted his the next day. Wu's last day came a week after that.
A fourth name depends on whom you read. 36Kr counts three departures. BigGo adds an engineering manager, Sunil Shah, while Ifeng Tech adds Jenny Wen, design lead for Claude and Cowork.
The exits bracket Anthropic's filing to go public on 26 October. In February the company had put Claude Code's run-rate revenue above two and a half billion dollars, and the prospectus lists the loss of key people, product staff among them, as a risk.
Anthropic's amended filing puts regrettable attrition, people it wanted to keep, at about 1% over the year. That rate covers the whole company for a year, and these are three or four names from one product in two weeks, so the two don't line up neatly. The company counted about 5,300 employees at the end of September, up from about 940 at the end of 2024.
If you build on Claude Code or Codex
Trying Codex after this news doesn't mean rewriting your agent rules, because one AGENTS.md can serve both agents. The codebase behind Mindket keeps every agent's rules in that file, the one Codex reads, and its CLAUDE.md imports it in its first lines. Cut down, the pair looks like this:
# AGENTS.md: Codex reads it before any work
- Run only the tests your change reaches, never the whole suite.
- Commit subjects read type(scope): subject.
- Never commit .env files, logs or build output.
# CLAUDE.md: Claude Code reads this one
@AGENTS.md- Claude Code reads
AGENTS.mdalone only when noCLAUDE.mdexists, so the import line is what keeps one set of rules (our CLAUDE.md guide). - A
SKILL.mdfolder runs in both agents, Claude Code from.claude/skillsand Codex from.agents/skills(our Codex skills guide lists its other folders). - An MCP server you set up once works in both as well, which a product's own plugins don't (what MCP is).
What nobody has confirmed yet
Anthropic hasn't said who leads Claude Code's product now. It declined to comment to Business Insider.
Her goodbye post gives no reason for leaving, and she hadn't answered Business Insider's request for comment when Sina relayed its story. Nor does any report give a formal title from OpenAI: they all quote her post.
On her Anthropic shares, someone asked on X whether leaving lets her sell earlier than staff who stay. She didn't know, and called it no factor in her choice.
Last verified 5 November 2026, 09:10 UTC, against the posts and reports listed under Sources. We will update this post when Anthropic names a successor.
Frequently asked questions
Where did Cat Wu work before Anthropic?
She studied computer science at Princeton and worked as an engineer at Scale AI and Dagster, then invested at Index Ventures from October 2021. She joined Anthropic in August 2024 as a product manager on the research side.
Has Cat Wu left Anthropic before?
Once, for about two weeks. In July 2025 she and Boris Cherny left for Anysphere, the company behind Cursor, and then came back.
Is Boris Cherny still at Anthropic?
As far as anyone has reported, yes. Cherny wrote the first Claude Code prototype, and Thariq Shihipar's goodbye calls him the one "who started it all".
When does Cat Wu start at OpenAI?
No report we read gives a date. Sottiaux's reply only says they'll be "building together soon".
Sources
- Cat Wu on X: leaving Anthropic (3 November 2026) https://x.com/_catwu/status/2117731934340337676
- Cat Wu on X: joining OpenAI (4 November 2026) https://x.com/_catwu/status/2118137612577968402
- Tibo Sottiaux on X: his reply to Cat Wu's post https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2118138648214585591
- Thariq Shihipar on X: leaving Anthropic (23 October 2026) https://x.com/trq212/status/2113844051938054167
- Anthony Morris on X: leaving Anthropic (24 October 2026) https://x.com/amorriscode/status/2113972174524674247
- Anthropic: S-1 filing announcement https://www.anthropic.com/news/s1-sec
- Anthropic PBC: Form S-1/A, Amendment No. 1 (SEC EDGAR) https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/2130357/000162828026068676/anthropicpbc-sx1ax1.htm
- Anthropic: Series G funding announcement (12 February 2026) https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-series-g-funding-380-billion-post-money-valuation
- Claude Code docs: permission modes https://code.claude.com/docs/en/permission-modes
- Unite.AI: Cat Wu to Lead Product Management for OpenAI’s Core Products https://www.unite.ai/cat-wu-to-lead-product-management-for-openais-core-products/
- Runtime Wire: Cat Wu leaves Anthropic and promptly joins OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products https://runtimewire.com/article/cat-wu-joins-openai-core-products-product-management
- 36Kr: Claude Code's Top Female Product Leader Joins OpenAI Just 1 Day After Announcing Resignation https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/4056162615350407
- BigGo Finance: Claude Code Product Lead Jumps to OpenAI as Anthropic Loses Fourth Core Team Member Ahead of IPO https://finance.biggo.com/news/cb10b4fe-8759-41ec-bbd6-fc370013991b
- IT Home: Former Anthropic Claude Code product lead Cat Wu jumps to OpenAI to run core product management (in Chinese) https://www.ithome.com/1/022/604.htm
- Ifeng Tech: Just now, Claude Code's top female product leader joins OpenAI (in Chinese) https://tech.ifeng.com/c/8xnoO0FtK9t
- Sina: Anthropic core product lead Cat Wu jumps to OpenAI (in Chinese) https://k.sina.cn/article_5952915705_162d248f906703sk94.html
- AI Product Hub: Claude Code product lead Cat Wu leaves (in Chinese) https://aiproducthub.cn/newsflash/anthropic-claude-code-product-lead-cat-wu-departs/