Two of the engineers most associated with Claude Code, Anthropic’s agentic coding tool, have announced their departures from the company within a day of each other — just weeks ahead of what is shaping up to be one of the largest public listings in history.
Thariq Shihipar, who went by the handle @trq212 on X and had become one of the most visible faces of Claude Code online, posted that he had left after “more than a year of working on Claude Code and seeing it scale larger than I ever imagined.” He added that he had “really loved working at Ant” (a common shorthand employees use for Anthropic) and believes “deeply in the mission, and most of all, the idea of a race to the top.”
Anthony Morris said his last day was the day before his announcement. “I created Claude Code on desktop because I believe everyone can be a builder,” he wrote, adding that every feature request and bug report from the community was “a gift that impacted millions of lives.” He thanked the community, saying “the product wouldn’t be what it is without you.”
Who Are Thariq Shihipar and Anthony Morris
Shihipar joined Anthropic as a Member of Technical Staff on the Claude Code team, where he became known for his work on the product’s skills system, context engineering, and what he called “dynamic” agent workflows. He was a frequent guest on developer podcasts, including an appearance where he explained why he favours writing specs in HTML over Markdown, and another where he detailed how the Claude Code team cut the tool’s system prompt by roughly 80 percent to stop hard-coded rules from constraining newer models.
Beyond the engineering work, Shihipar was arguably Claude Code’s most recognisable voice on X apart from Boris Cherny. He routinely fielded bug reports, feature requests, and criticism from developers directly in his replies, effectively functioning as Anthropic’s public-facing representative for the product. That visibility cut both ways — when Anthropic came under fire over an incident involving hidden code embedded in a Claude Code release, it was Shihipar who stepped in to publicly address the backlash on behalf of the company.
Morris, for his part, described himself as the creator of Claude Code’s desktop application, built on the premise of making coding accessible to non-engineers as well. His posts suggest he spent his tenure close to the product’s user feedback loop, framing much of his work as a direct response to what the community asked for.
Neither Shihipar nor Morris detailed what they plan to do next.
A Pattern of Departures Ahead of the Listing
The exits come at a sensitive moment for Anthropic. The company confidentially filed paperwork for a U.S. IPO back in June, and has since been reported to be targeting a listing as early as mid-November at a valuation of somewhere between $1.8 trillion and $2 trillion — which would make it the largest public offering ever, surpassing SpaceX’s record $75 billion raise earlier this year.
Anthropic has historically had one of the lowest voluntary attrition rates among the major AI labs, something commentators have partly attributed to the company’s tighter restrictions on employee share liquidity compared to rivals like OpenAI, where several senior executives have exited in the run-up to that company’s own public listing. It is also the only AI lab to still have its founding team intact. An imminent IPO changes that calculus considerably, since it finally gives vested employees a clear path to cashing out their equity — raising the possibility that Shihipar and Morris are early examples of a broader wave of departures still to come.
The timing is also notable given how actively Anthropic has otherwise been recruiting talent — including, as it happens, specialists from rival chip and hardware teams — even as it now loses two developers who were deeply embedded in one of its flagship products.
Claude Code has become central to Anthropic’s growth story ahead of the IPO; the company has said internally that it now uses Claude to generate nearly all of its own code, and has positioned the agentic coding tool as a key pillar of its enterprise pitch to investors. Losing two of the engineers most identified with building and publicly representing that product, right as the roadshow nears, is the kind of optics Anthropic would likely have preferred to avoid.