Cat Wu will lead product management for OpenAI’s core products: Unite.AI

Cat Wu announced on November 5, 2026 that she will join OpenAI to lead product management of Core Products.

Wu said he respects OpenAI for proving that scale works, bringing artificial intelligence to more than a billion people, and making great products at the heart of its mission. He named Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s product management team, and employees across the company as people he was excited to work with.

Its stated goal is to create agents who support users and their teams, maintain control over users, and give them more time for the people and work they love. He also invited ongoing feedback.

Claude code wallpaper

The move follows Wu’s November 3, 2026 announcement that he was leaving Anthropic. She joined the Claude Code project two years earlier, when it was a small internal tool, after asking him to create a reinforcement learning environment and guiding him for dozens of hours without manually writing code. In his account, usage developed from manually approving permission requests, and Claude’s usage focused on answering questions and writing tests towards default automatic approval, large migrations, and building new products. He gave credit to the Claude Code, Cowork, and Tag teams, along with the users whose feedback shaped what they shipped.

Persistent agents and user control

Sottiaux is named OpenAI’s Core Products Lead in the June 11, 2026 announcement of OpenAI’s planned acquisition of Ona, which would bring Ona’s secure cloud execution and orchestration technology to the Codex. OpenAI reported at the time that more than 5 million people were using Codex every week, up 400% from early 2026, and that the tool had expanded beyond software development to research, analysis, building and automation. The ad linked the next phase to a job that spanned hours or days rather than minutes.

Ona’s planned integration would provide persistent environments where agents can access tools, systems and context over time, including work that continues within the customer’s cloud environment when laptops are closed. OpenAI’s design is intended to allow users to check progress, provide guidance, make decisions, and review results remotely rather than remaining tied to the device or session from which an activity began.

For organizational deployments, documented requirements involve control over where agents run, what they can access, how credentials are defined, how activity is logged, and how work passes through review. Ona’s customer-controlled execution model would allow agents to operate within an organization’s cloud environment while OpenAI provides intelligence and orchestration. These controls give Wu’s emphasis on user control a concrete business context: Delegation depends on the agent’s capabilities and the boundaries around its work.

Greg Brockman, identified as OpenAI’s president and co-founder in OpenAI’s Google Cloud announcement on October 21, 2026, welcomed Wu following his appointment. Sottiaux also welcomed her and said he was looking forward to working together.

Wu’s career move connects complementary approaches to the same product problem. His Claude Code account describes the progression from approving individual actions to delegating large tasks, while OpenAI’s agents’ documented plans combine persistent work with remote review and organizational controls. His appointment brings this expertise to Core Products, where the product challenge is how to expand delegated work while preserving users’ ability to direct, inspect and govern it.