Anthropic has appointed a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil. Patil started at the company earlier this week, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as Chief Architect.
As part of this change, Anthropic is updating the structure of its core technical group. This brings the company’s product-engineering team into closer contact with the infrastructure and inference teams. In his role as CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and a variety of other engineering tasks. In the chief architect role, McCandlish will work on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending much of his previous work. Both Patil and McCandlish will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei.
This new leadership structure comes as Anthropic faces intense infrastructure competition from AI labs at OpenAI and Meta, which have invested billions into computing infrastructure. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta plans to spend six hundred billion dollars on US infrastructure through the end of 2028, and OpenAI has contracted a similar amount through its work with Oracle and the Stargate project. The scale of Anthropic’s own infrastructure spending is less clear, but there will be immense pressure to optimize the growing infrastructure for both speed and power consumption.
At the same time, the popularity of Anthropic’s Claude products has already put the company’s infrastructure under significant strain. In July, the company introduced new rate limits to Claude Code, with an eye towards power users who had been running the app continuously in the background, twenty-four seven. Under the new rules, users are limited to between two hundred forty to four hundred eighty hours of Sonnet usage each week, and twenty-four to forty hours of Opus 4 usage, depending on infrastructure strain.
With more than twenty years in different engineering roles, Patil brings significant infrastructure experience to Anthropic. He previously spent five years in technical roles at Stripe, and served as a senior vice president for cloud infrastructure at Oracle. He has also held engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft.
In a statement, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei emphasized Patil’s experience building stable infrastructure for enterprises. She stated that Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need, adding that she could not be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.
In a paired statement, Patil applauded Anthropic’s research and commitment to AI safety. He said he is thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development, adding that his work at the company feels like the most important work he could be doing right now and that he personally cannot think of a greater calling and responsibility.