Anthropic is having an exceptional year, driven by the tech industry's intense focus on AI models. The company may soon surpass its main rival, as it seeks to raise tens of billions of dollars in a funding round that could value it at approximately $950 billion—compared to OpenAI's $854 billion valuation from its March round. Business customers are increasingly choosing Claude over ChatGPT, with a recent report showing Anthropic has quadrupled its market share among corporate clients since May 2025.

Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of product for Claude Code and Cowork, has been instrumental in this success. Since joining the company in August 2024, Wu has guided Claude through a critical transformation, evolving it from a basic informational chatbot into a coding tool and beyond. She oversees new feature development and often collaborates with Boris Cherny, a core technical staff member and creator of Claude Code. The duo is frequently described as Anthropic's "Batman and Robin."

Wu sat down with me at last week’s second annual Code with Claude conference in San Francisco, where she discussed her product strategy and vision for how users will interact with Claude in the future. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

**When you’re looking at product strategy, how much of it is reactive to your peers or competitors?**

The main thing we design for is staying on the exponential. Across our team, we instill the lesson that AI will just keep getting better. For us, we just need to remain at this frontier. We don’t think about competitors. If you do, you end up perpetually two weeks or a month behind how fast you can execute. That’s not the best way to stay at the frontier.

**Anthropic released at least six models last year and has already released almost as many this year. Do you expect this pace to continue?**

Our hope is that it continues (laughing). The models are still improving at a very steady pace, so we should be able to keep sharing them with users. The deployments might look a bit different—like how we handled Glasswing—but as much as possible, we want this intelligence to benefit as many people as possible, and it has to be handled in a very safe way. That’s why we handled Glasswing the way we did. [Glasswing is an initiative Anthropic launched in April, inviting a small consortium of partner organizations—including Amazon, Apple, CrowdStrike, and Microsoft—to access its new cybersecurity model, Mythos. Unlike many of Anthropic’s other AI models, Mythos is not being released to the general public. The company has stated it fears the model, designed to scan codebases for software vulnerabilities, is too powerful and could be weaponized by bad actors.]

**You said in a previous interview that the future of work is basically staff managing fleets of agents. It seems that could lead to agents being better at the job than humans.**

I think it is extremely hard to manage agents if you can’t do the job yourself. Managers still need to be experts in their domain. It’s a new skill set many people will have to learn, but managing agents is very similar to managing people. You have to understand why the agent made a mistake—did it misinterpret my instruction? Was my request under-specified? You need the ability to debug it.

**It does seem like the long-term goal is to cut down on team size, though. If agents do the job, you don’t need an intern, right?**

Ideally, the idea is that everyone can get a lot more done. For everyone’s job, there’s always a percentage that’s really tedious. For me, it’s responding to emails. Everyone has this part of their life. My hope is that AI agents handle that, and then everyone has all these cool things they will want to build in their spare time.

**What are you most excited about in the next six months?**

The next big thing is proactivity. Last year, we were in a world of synchronous development. Right now, people are shifting to routines—automating responses to customer support tickets, for example. The next step is that Claude understands what you work on and just sets up some of these automations for you.