Anthropic’s Kat Wu says that in the future, AI will anticipate your needs before you know what they are

With the technology industry’s singular focus on AI models, Anthropic has had an exceptionally good year.

The company may soon overtake its main rival, as it looks to raise tens of billions of dollars in a funding round that would raise its valuation. About 950 billion dollars (It was OpenAI With a value of $854 billion In March round ), business clients are increasingly expressing a Prefer Claude over ChatGPT. A recent report showed Anthropy It recently outperformed OpenAI among business clientsquadrupling its market share since May 2025.

Cat Wu, Anthropic’s head of products for Claude Code and Cowork, has been a key figure in this success. Since joining the company in August 2024, Wu has helped shepherd Claude through a critical phase, scaling it up from a purely informational chatbot to a coding tool and beyond. Wu, who oversees new feature development, is frequently paired with Boris Cherny, a core member of Anthropic’s technical staff and creator of Claude Code, leading the duo to be It is characterized by Anthropic “Batman and Robin”.

Wu sat down with me at the second annual Code with Claude conference last week in San Francisco, where she discussed her thinking about product strategy and how she hopes the Claude user experience will change in the future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

When you look at product strategy, how much does it interact with your peers or competitors? Do you think about it at all?

The main thing we design for is staying exponential, so I think, across our team, we’re instilling in everyone the lesson that AI will continue to get better. For us, we just need to stay on these boundaries. We don’t think about competitors. I think if you think about competitors, you’ll end up, invariably, two weeks, or something like that, a month behind on how quickly you can execute. So it’s not usually the best way to stay on the border.

Anthropic released at least six models last year, and has already released nearly that many this year. Do you expect this pace of development to continue?

Our hope is that it will continue (laughs). I think the models are still improving at a very steady pace, so we should be able to continue to share those with our users. I think the deployments might look a little bit different — like the way we handled Glasswing, but as much as possible, we want that intelligence to benefit as many people as possible, and it needs to be handled in a very secure way, which is why we approached Glasswing (the way we did).

(Glasswing is an Anthropy initiative It was launched in April Which invited a small consortium of partner organizations – including companies like Amazon, Apple, CrowdStrike and Microsoft – to come up with the new Mythos cybersecurity model. Unlike many of Anthropic’s other AI models, Mythos has not been released to the public. The company claimed it feared the model — designed to scan code bases for software vulnerabilities — would be so powerful, it could be used as a weapon by bad actors.)

You said in a previous interview that the future of work is essentially employees managing fleets of agents. It seems that this might eventually lead to a situation where agents are better at the job, or know the job better than a human.

I think it’s very difficult to manage dealerships if you can’t do the job yourself. I think managers still need to be experts in their field. It’s a new skill set that a lot of people are going to have to learn, but actually managing agents is a lot like being a people manager in the sense that you have to understand, like, why did the agent make this mistake? Did he misinterpret my instructions? Was my order not specified? You must have the ability to correct it.

The long-term goal seems to be to reduce the size of the team. Because if you had agents doing a job, you wouldn’t need an intern, would you?

Ideally, I think the idea is that everyone can accomplish a lot. I think for everyone’s job, there’s always a percentage of it that’s really boring. For me, it’s responding to emails. I think everyone has that part of their life…so I hope that (AI agents) will actually do that, and then everyone will have, like, all these cool things that they’ll want to build (in their spare time).

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

I think the next big thing is initiative. Last year we were in this world of simultaneous development. Right now, people are turning to routine, automating responses to customer support tickets, for example. I think the next step is for Claude to understand what you’re working on, and set up some of that automation for you.