Anthropic Product Leader Cat Wu Leaves Company Ahead of Expected IPO

Cat Wu, a top product manager at Anthropic and head of product for its Claude Code tool, left the company on Friday, Business Insider reported. Wu announced her departure on Tuesday afternoon on X, thanking the Claude Code team and its users. Business Insider and FourWeekMBA both report that her exit comes ahead of Anthropic's planned initial public offering. [1][5]

According to Business Insider, Wu served as one of the two top leaders and evangelists for Claude Code alongside its original creator, Boris Cherny. The publication reported that the tool provided Anthropic with a viral product that helped boost the company's growth. FourWeekMBA added that Claude Code helped drive a 45-fold increase in revenue for the business. [1][5]

Claude is a series of large language models developed by American software company Anthropic, which sells agentic tools including the terminal coding agent Claude Code. Lead engineer Boris Cherny noted that approximately 80% of Claude Code's own codebase was generated by the tool itself under human direction and review. Anthropic's team later used Claude Code to develop its Cowork productivity tool. [6][8]

The departure follows broader competitive and product developments around the tool. ZDNET reported that a recent Claude Code update uses a thread parameter for API requests to speed up developer sessions without altering token consumption or costs. Meanwhile, SiliconANGLE reported that vulnerability management startup Cogent Security Inc. released a reasoning model called VR-1.1 that outscored Claude Code on a public software vulnerability repair benchmark. [2][4]