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Two of Claude Code's Most Public Engineers Left Anthropic Within a Day of Each Other, Weeks Before a Reported IPO

Coding Assistants · By: AIReport Admin · 1 hour ago · 👁 9
Two of Claude Code's Most Public Engineers Left Anthropic Within a Day of Each Other, Weeks Before a Reported IPO

Thariq Shihipar, the most visible public-facing engineer on Anthropic's Claude Code after Boris Cherny, announced his departure on October 24, and Anthony Morris, creator of the Claude Code desktop app, said his last day was October 23. The exits land weeks before Anthropic's reported mid-November IPO target, and neither engineer has said where they are going.

Anthropic's most successful developer product just lost two of its best-known human faces. Thariq Shihipar, an engineer on the Claude Code team who had become the product's most visible public voice after creator Boris Cherny, posted on October 24 that he had left the company after more than a year working on skills, context engineering and agent workflows. One day earlier, Anthony Morris, the creator of the Claude Code desktop application, told followers that October 23 was his last day.

The two exits are striking less for their seniority than for their timing and their roles. Claude Code is Anthropic's flagship agent product, the tool credited with driving a large share of the company's enterprise momentum, and both men were among the handful of people who explained it to the outside world. Shihipar ran tutorials and technical deep-dives on skills, the Agent SDK and context engineering alongside Cherny; Morris built the desktop app that took Claude Code out of the terminal and gave it multi-session windows, web previews and point-and-edit interfaces for non-terminal users.

Morris's background has become its own story in the Chinese developer press. He dropped out of high school in 2008 after a stretch of severe depression, worked his way up from IT support jobs installing printers and servers to a Cisco software engineering role, failed a Toptal algorithm screening with a score of 57 out of 300, and shipped the Claude Code desktop app with a partner named Alice four months after receiving a 15-word rejection from another employer. In comments on his farewell post he said he had not been fired. AI commentator Andrew Curran speculated on X that the pair might be joining a new lab, but neither man has confirmed a next step.

Shihipar kept his own farewell characteristically light. He wrote that Claude Code had grown far faster than the team originally expected, said he still believes in the company's mission and its "race to the top" framing of AI competition, and added that he plans to rest before his next move. He then appended a joke that circulated widely: "wait, am I the only one who thinks Opus 5.5 got dumber?"

The departures come at a delicate moment. Anthropic is reportedly targeting a mid-November IPO, with press projections valuing the company at between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion, though the company has not confirmed the listing or the valuation. Community trackers have counted Claude Code's GitHub repository growing from about 81,000 stars to more than 153,000 in seven months, and workplace surveys place it at or near the top of coding-assistant usage. Anthropic has also said internally that roughly 90 percent of Claude Code's own code is now written by Claude, a figure reported secondhand and not independently verified.

There is no evidence the exits signal product trouble, and high-velocity AI labs lose senior people constantly. But public-facing engineers are the connective tissue between a fast-moving agent product and the developers who depend on it, and both men were unusually good at that job. For a company weeks away from asking public-market investors to underwrite its story, losing the two people best at telling that story to developers, on back-to-back days and without disclosed destinations, is the kind of detail that rival sales teams will not let go unnoticed.

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