Cat Wu
Cat Wu, also known as Catherine Wu, is a software engineer and product leader who led Claude Code and Cowork at AnthropicAnthropicAnthropic is an artificial intelligence research and product company founded in 2021 that develops the Claude models, assistant, and tools such as Claude Code, and operates as a public benefit corporation. Dario Amodei and Daniela Amodei are its co-founders, and its research covers model safety, interpretability, and steerability.Open the full entry and previously worked at Scale AI, Dagster and Index VenturesIndex VenturesIndex Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1996. It invests from seed through growth and operates across London, San Francisco and New York, supporting technology companies through a transatlantic network.Open the full entry.
Contents11 sections
Key facts
Education: Computer science and study abroad
Cat Wu lists her professional biography as Catherine Wu. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry and spent a fall semester studying abroad at ETH Zürich.[1]
2016Engineering and finance internships
She interned in software engineering at GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry from February to May 2016 and in sales and trading on JPMorganJPMorgan Chase & Co.JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company headquartered in New York that operates investment banking, consumer and small business financial services, commercial banking, financial transaction processing and asset management under its J.P. Morgan and Chase brands; its roots trace back to the Manhattan Company of 1799.Open the full entry’s equity derivatives desk from June to August.[2]
2018–2021Scale AI and Dagster
From 2018 to 2020, she was a product engineer at Scale AI. In 2020–2021, she was an engineering manager at Dagster Labs, helping develop its first commercial product and onboard early customers.[3]
2021–2024Partner at Index Ventures
From October 2021 to August 2024, she was a partner at Index Ventures, following her engineering roles.[2]
August 2024Joining Anthropic
She joined Anthropic’s research product management team in August 2024 and subsequently worked on Claude Code, initially using the internal tool to build feedback applications and reinforcement-learning environments.[4]
She later led product work for Claude Code and Cowork, tools in Anthropic’s product ecosystem around Claude (AI model)Claude (AI model)Claude is a family of large language models and the AI assistant of the same name developed by the American AI company Anthropic, offered through a chat interface and API since March 2023. The models are divided into tiers by capability and cost, such as Haiku, Sonnet and Opus, with two higher tiers, Mythos and Fable, added from 2026; as of October 2026, the main model Anthropic recommends is Claude Opus 5.5.Open the full entry.[5]
July 2025Cursor role
In July 2025, she held a head-of-product role at AnysphereCursorCursor is the trading name of U.S. AI coding software company Anysphere, Inc. and its namesake coding tool. Founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger, it began as an AI-native development environment forked from VS Code and later shifted toward agent-centered coding. Its November 2025 Series D valued the company at $29.3 billion post-money; on August 14, 2026, SpaceX completed an all-stock acquisition at an implied equity value of $60 billion, making Cursor a wholly owned subsidiary.Open the full entry, the company behind Cursor.[6]
She subsequently returned to Anthropic.[7]
March 19, 2026Product management amid rapid model change
In an authored essay, she advocated shorter development cycles, working prototypes and evaluations, revisiting features after model upgrades, and removing obsolete workarounds. These were her product-management views.[4]
April 23, 2026Product-team interview
She appeared on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast to discuss development speed, changing product-management roles and designing for future model capabilities.[5]
October 30, 2026Final day at Anthropic
On November 3, 2026, she announced on X that the preceding Friday, October 30, had been her last day at Anthropic. She recalled progressing from manually approving Claude Code actions to delegating larger tasks, and thanked the Claude Code, Cowork and Tag teams. The post did not disclose her reason for leaving or next role.[8]
Related organizations, websites and public accounts
X: Public account: https://x.com/_catwu (opens in a new window).[4]
LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Professional profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cat-wu/ (opens in a new window).[9]
Cat’s Newsletter: Personal newsletter: https://catwu.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).[5]
Sources
- Catherine Wu | LinkedIn (opens in a new window)
- Catherine Wu | LinkedIn (opens in a new window)
- Cat Wu: Bio, Work & Ideas | AI Engineer (opens in a new window)
- Product management on the AI exponential (opens in a new window)
- How Anthropic’s product team moves faster than anyone else | Cat Wu (Head of Product, Claude Code) (opens in a new window)
- Catherine Wu - Head of Product, Claude Code @ Anthropic - Crunchbase Person Profile (opens in a new window)
- Anthropic Hires Back Two Coding AI Leaders From Cursor Developer Anysphere (opens in a new window)
- cat on X: “Friday was my last day at Anthropic.” (opens in a new window)
- Catherine Wu | LinkedIn (opens in a new window)