OpenAI has hired Catherine "Cat" Wu, the product leader behind Anthropic's Claude Code, to lead product management for its Core Products group. Wu announced the move on 5 November 2026, days after leaving her rival employer.

Wu spent two years at Anthropic, where she led product for Claude Code and its companion tool Cowork, turning what began as an internal coding tool into one of the company's most important commercial products. She joined Anthropic in August 2024 and her last day there was 30 October.

At OpenAI she will report to Core Products lead Thibault Sottiaux and work alongside enterprise product lead Nick Turley and consumer product lead Ashley Alexander. Her stated priority is building reliable AI agents that keep users in control while freeing up their time, including agents that can keep working on tasks for hours inside a customer's cloud environment.

Wu praised OpenAI for bringing AI tools to more than a billion people. The move underlines how fiercely the two companies are competing for talent as well as technology: OpenAI's Codex competes directly with Claude Code, and Wu is the third member of the Claude Code team to leave publicly within two weeks, after engineer Thariq Shihipar announced his departure on 24 October.

The hire also comes weeks before Anthropic's expected stock market listing. Anthropic said in February that Claude Code's annualised revenue run rate had passed 2.5 billion dollars, with enterprise customers contributing more than half.