AI startup Anthropic has named former Stripe executive Rahul Patil as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO), strengthening its leadership bench at a time when global AI labs are locked in an infrastructure arms race.
Patil began his role earlier this week and succeeds co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will now take on the position of Chief Architect.
As part of the transition, Anthropic is reworking its core technical structure. The company’s product-engineering team will now work more closely with infrastructure and inference groups. In his new role, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference and broader engineering operations.
McCandlish, meanwhile, will continue to focus on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending his prior work. Both leaders will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
The leadership changes come amid mounting competition from rivals OpenAI and Meta, both of which are investing heavily in computing infrastructure. Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg has committed to spending USD 600 billion on US infrastructure through 2028, while OpenAI has tied up with Oracle’s Stargate project for similar levels of investment.
Anthropic’s Claude AI models are already testing the limits of its infrastructure. In July, the company introduced new rate limits for Claude Code after noticing heavy usage from power users running the app continuously. Depending on system strain, users are now capped at 240-480 hours of Sonnet usage and 24-40 hours of Opus 4 usage per week.
Patil, who brings over two decades of engineering leadership, is expected to bolster Anthropic’s ability to scale. He spent five years at Stripe, where he rose to become CTO and previously served as Senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle. He has also held key engineering positions at Amazon and Microsoft.
“Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling dependable infrastructure for enterprises,” said Amodei in a statement. “I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.”
Patil, who holds degrees from PESIT (BE in computer science), Arizona State University (MS in computer science) and the University of Washington (MBA), said joining Anthropic “feels like the most important work I could be doing right now. I personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.” |
