Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure

Anthropic has 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 the change, Anthropic is updating the structure of its core technical group, bringing the company’s product-engineering team into closer contact with the infrastructure and inference teams. 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 $600 billion 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, 24/7.” Under the new rules, users are limited to between 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet usage each week, and 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4 usage, depending on infrastructure strain.

With more than 20 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 VP 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. “Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need,” the statement reads. “I couldn’t 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. “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development,” Patil said, adding that his work at the company “feels like the most important work I could be doing right now — I personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.