TL;DR
- OpenAI Hire: OpenAI hired Cat Wu, former product head for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI coding assistant, to lead product management for its Core Products group.
- Product Work: She will collaborate on enterprise and consumer products, according to an OpenAI representative.
- User Control: She wants to build AI agents, software that performs tasks for people and teams, while keeping users in control.
OpenAI is hiring Cat Wu, a product leader for Anthropic’s Claude Code AI coding agent, to head product management for its Core Products group. She will report to OpenAI’s Tibo Sottiaux.
The representative said Wu would work with Nick Turley on enterprise products and Ashley Alexander on consumer products. Her full product portfolio and start date have not been specified.
Wu announced her destination after a November 3 farewell in which she said the previous Friday, October 30, had been her last day at Anthropic. In her OpenAI announcement, she praised the company’s product focus and its role in bringing AI to a wide audience.
Some news: I’m joining OpenAI to lead product management for Core Products!
I have a lot of respect for OpenAI for showing the world that scaling works, for bringing AI to over a billion people, and for believing great products are core to the mission.
I’m excited to work with…
— cat (@_catwu) November 5, 2026
From Coding Tools to Workplace Tasks
Wu headed product for both Claude Code and Cowork at Anthropic. Cowork works with files and tools chosen by the user, handling tasks such as organizing folders and preparing short reports.
Claude Code is optimized for software work, writes code and runs tests under a developer’s direction., similar to OpenAI’s Codex.
Wu described working with marketing, sales and finance teams and hiring product managers in an April interview recounted by Business Insider.
In October 2025, Claude Code moved into the browser, letting developers delegate bug fixes and feature work to agents running on Anthropic’s cloud infrastructure. Wu discussed making the tool more widely accessible while retaining the command-line interface for advanced users. Claude Code, just like Codex, is now available via desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux.
By March 2026, she was explaining the priorities behind Claude Code Review,. which assigns several AI agents to inspect proposed code changes, with developers retaining final approval to merge them. Wu emphasized actionable feedback on logic errors.
Delegating Work While Keeping Control
Wu said Claude Code was a small internal tool when she first used it two years before her departure. She relied on it to build a reinforcement-learning environment, software used to train AI systems through feedback, and spent tens of hours steering the work without manually writing code. The experience persuaded her to join the team.
She described how users were quickly progressing from approving individual prompts and delegating narrower tasks to handing over larger programming jobs.
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. I steered it for tens of hours but never manually wrote a line of code. It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team.
When we first launched, most…
— cat (@_catwu) November 3, 2026
At OpenAI, Wu says she wants to build agents that support people and their teams while keeping users able to direct them.
