On the eve of Anthropic's sprint toward its IPO, three core members—including Cat Wu, the lead product manager for Claude Code—departed in quick succession. Cat Wu and another former Anthropic growth marketing employee both joined competitor OpenAI. Cat Wu was an early core contributor to Claude Code and once partnered with founder Boris Cherny to drive the product from an early prototype into Anthropic's core revenue engine. The two had previously left briefly and returned together, but this time they have formally parted ways. None of the departing members publicly criticized the company or explained their specific reasons for leaving. Cat Wu will lead product management for core products at OpenAI, and her past experience aligns closely with OpenAI's current product strategy of advancing AI agent integration and expanding its user base across a wide range of work scenarios. Although Anthropic's current valuation is as high as the trillion-dollar level and employee equity incentives have accumulated enormous potential value—with some employees already able to cash out through internal share sales before the IPO—core members still chose to leave on the eve of the listing. Behind this lie both the rules of talent competition in Silicon Valley and the talent retention challenges Anthropic faces in its transformation from a research institution into a large tech company.