Anthropic loses product lead Catherine Wu behind Claude Code to OpenAI
Anthropic loses product lead Catherine Wu behind Claude Code to OpenAI
Anthropic's Claude Code product lead Catherine Wu announced she is joining OpenAI, working in product management for Core Products. She said that when she joined two years ago, Claude Code was a small internal tool, and now she trusts Claude by default to handle large migrations and build products.
OpenAI poaches a Claude Code co-developer from Anthropic. Catherine Wu, who led product for Claude Code at Anthropic, is joining OpenAI to run product management for "Core Products," a hire that underscores the fierce competition between the two companies, which plays out not just at the model level but across pricing, product strategy, and talent. Codex and ChatGPT head Thibault Sottiaux welcomed her with a one-word quip: "CatGPT."
Wu says she wants to build agents that take work off users' plates while keeping them in control. By her own account, she joined Anthropic two years ago, when Claude Code was still a small internal tool and most users approved every permission request by hand. Today, the default is to trust Claude's judgment, and Claude handles large migrations and builds new products, Wu says.
Growth marketing manager Austin Lau is also moving from Anthropic to OpenAI. Beyond those two, Anthropic has recently lost skills and context engineer Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris, who built Claude Code Desktop, though neither has gone to OpenAI, at least not yet.
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Source: The Decoder · the-decoder.com