Anthropic's Catherine Wu joins OpenAI to lead core products
What's the story
In a significant development in the AI sector, Catherine Wu has joined OpenAI as the head of product management for its Core Products. The move comes just two days after she announced her departure from rival AI company Anthropic on November 3, 2026. Wu expressed her enthusiasm for the new role in a post on X.
Future plans
Wu's vision aligns with OpenAI's mission
Wu expressed her admiration for OpenAI in her post, saying the company has demonstrated that scaling works and brought AI tools to over a billion people.
She also praised OpenAI's commitment to making great products central to its mission.
"I'm excited to work with @thsottiaux, an incredible PM team, and everyone across OpenAI," she said.
Wu also hinted at future developments in AI technology under her leadership at OpenAI.
Professional background
Extensive experience in AI product development
Wu has extensive hands-on experience in developing AI tools. She spent two years at Anthropic, where she played a key role in shaping Claude Code from a small internal project.
During her time there, she even asked the AI to build a reinforcement-learning environment and guided it for dozens of hours without manually writing code.
Strategic alignment
OpenAI's planned acquisition of Ona and its implications
Wu's vision of keeping users in control aligns perfectly with OpenAI's future plans.
In June 2026, the company announced its intention to acquire Ona, a start-up specializing in secure cloud execution.
The aim is to integrate Ona's tech into OpenAI's Codex, which already has over five million weekly users, 400% more than earlier this year.
Product evolution
The future of Codex and persistent agents
Codex has already expanded beyond software development into research, analysis, and automation.
The next step is creating "persistent agents," which would allow the AI to continue working on tasks for hours even after a laptop is closed. This would be done securely within a customer's own cloud environment.
Users would have the ability to monitor progress, give directions, make decisions, and review final results remotely.
User empowerment
Addressing the challenges in AI expansion
For businesses, this level of control is critical.
Organizations need strict boundaries on where agents run, what data they can access, and how their work is logged and reviewed.
By leveraging Wu's experience in delegating large tasks to AI with OpenAI's persistent cloud models, the company hopes to tackle a major challenge: expanding AI capabilities while ensuring easy human direction, inspection, and governance.