Anthropic has seen three employees associated with its Claude Code product leave the company within 10 days. The departures include Thariq Shihipar, Anthony Morris and Cat Wu, who worked on the development and product management of the AI coding tool.
Wu announced her departure on November 3, saying that October 30 was her last day at Anthropic. Her exit follows announcements by Shihipar and Morris on October 24, when both said they had left the company.
The departures are notable given Claude Code’s growing role in Anthropic’s business and its competition with other AI coding tools.
In her post on X, Wu recalled joining Anthropic after testing an early version of Claude Code. “Two years ago, when Claude Code was a small internal tool, I asked it to build an RL env. I steered it for tens of hours but never manually wrote a line of code. It worked, I was hooked, and I joined the team,” she wrote.
She said the product had changed considerably since its early days, when users manually approved most permission requests and primarily used Claude to answer questions and write tests.
“Today, the default is trusting Claude’s judgment to auto-approve. Claude does large migrations and builds new products,” Wu wrote.
Wu also oversaw Cowork, Anthropic’s AI tool for tasks beyond software development. She worked with teams across marketing, sales and finance, and helped hire product managers for the company.
Wu joined Anthropic in 2024 and was among the people who tested an early version of Claude Code. Anthropic confirmed her departure to Business Insider, which first reported the exit.
Shihipar announced his departure on October 24 after spending more than a year working on Claude Code. He did not disclose his next move but said he wanted to take a break before starting something new.
“I’ve left Anthropic after more than a year of working on Claude Code and seeing it scale larger than I ever imagined,” he wrote.
Morris, meanwhile, announced his departure on October 24. He was responsible for creating Claude Code’s desktop application, which allows developers to work with AI coding agents through a graphical interface.
“I created Claude Code on desktop because I believe everyone can be a builder,” Morris wrote.
He credited users’ feature requests and bug reports with helping shape the product, adding that their feedback had impacted millions of lives.
“Walking away from my best friends, a product I poured my heart into, and the mission was the hardest thing I’ve done in my career,” he wrote. Morris said he would share his next plans soon.
The departures come as Claude Code has become an important part of Anthropic’s product portfolio. The company released the coding tool in research preview in February 2025. It allows developers to delegate coding tasks to AI agents, including writing and modifying code, running commands and handling software development workflows.
Anthropic said in February that Claude Code had crossed $2.5 billion in annualised revenue run rate. The tool has also helped the company compete with OpenAI’s Codex and other AI coding products.
Anthropic is also preparing for a potential public listing. In an amended S-1 filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission on November 2, the company reported revenue of $16.96 billion for the September quarter, up 47% from the previous quarter.
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