Rahul Patil has joined Anthropic as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He was appointed to the position earlier this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who has transitioned to the role of Chief Architect.
About Rahul Patil CTO at Anthropic
Previous experience: Before joining Anthropic, Patil spent five years at the fintech company Stripe, where he also served as CTO. His background also includes significant engineering and leadership roles at Amazon and Microsoft.
Focus at Anthropic: Patil brings over 20 years of experience in building and scaling dependable infrastructure. In his new role, he will oversee Anthropic's computing, infrastructure, and engineering operations.
Strategic importance: His appointment is a strategic move for Anthropic, which is focused on strengthening its infrastructure to keep up with the intense competition from other AI labs like OpenAI and Meta.
Company Restructuring
To support this new leadership, Anthropic has restructured its core technical organization.
The goal is to bring the company's product engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams into closer alignment to improve coordination and accelerate development.
Both Patil and McCandlish will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amode
10 Key Points Summary
Anthropic has appointed former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new chief technical officer, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish.
Sam McCandlish will move to the role of chief architect and will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training.
As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and broader engineering tasks at Anthropic.
Both Patil and McCandlish will report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
The company is reorganizing its technical team, bringing product engineering closer to infrastructure and inference groups for better integration.
These moves come as Anthropic faces heightened infrastructure competition with OpenAI and Meta—Meta plans to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure by 2028.
OpenAI has also contracted billions for infrastructure development via partnerships with Oracle and the Stargate project.
Anthropic recently imposed new rate limits on Claude Code products due to the strain on infrastructure from heavy usage.
Patil brings over 20 years of experience in technology, previously serving at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft, with a strong record of building enterprise-scale infrastructure.
Both Patil and Anthropic’s leadership emphasize his mission to strengthen Claude’s position as a leading AI platform, while continuing a focus on AI safety and scalability.