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Anthropic Names Rahul Patil as New CTO, Restructures Technical Leadership

Prime Highlight:

  • Anthropic has named Rahul Patil, former CTO of Stripe, as its new CTO, with co-founder Sam McCandlish moving into the role of Chief Architect.
  • The leadership change aims to align product-engineering with infrastructure and inference teams, strengthening Anthropic’s ability to scale AI systems.

Key Facts:

  • The shift comes amid an AI infrastructure race, with Meta planning nearly $600B U.S. investments by 2028 and OpenAI partnering with Oracle’s Stargate project.
  • Rising demand for Claude productshas strained Anthropic’s systems, prompting usage limits on Claude Code earlier this year.

Background

AI safety and research company, Anthropic, has appointed Rahul Patil, former CTO of Stripe, as its new Chief Technical Officer. Patil takes over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will now serve as Chief Architect.

The leadership reshuffle is part of Anthropic’s move to bring product-engineering closer to its infrastructure and inference teams. As CTO, Patil will manage computing power, infrastructure, and engineering strategy. McCandlish, meanwhile, will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training, continuing much of his earlier research. Both will report directly to company president Daniela Amodei.

This change is timed in the midst of a great infrastructure race among major AI labs. Meta has committed to investing almost $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure by 2028, and OpenAI has partnered with Oracle and its Stargate project to purchase similar sums. The figures on anthropic spending are not clear, but what is clear is that the company is under increased pressure to scale speed and ensure power consumption is managed efficiently.

The surge in demand for Anthropic’s Claude products has already strained its systems. In July, the firm introduced usage limits for Claude Code to prevent continuous heavy use by power users.

Patil brings over two decades of experience in engineering and infrastructure, including senior roles at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft.

Amodei praised Patil’s “proven track record in building dependable infrastructure,” while Patil said joining Anthropic “feels like the most important work I could be doing right now.”