Anthropic has appointed Rahul Patil, former Chief Technology Officer at Stripe, as its new CTO.
He succeeds co-founder Sam McCandlish, who is transitioning into the role of Chief Architect.
Patil joined the company earlier this week. Alongside his appointment, Anthropic is restructuring its core technical organization.
The company is bringing product-engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams into closer alignment.
As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and other critical engineering operations.
McCandlish, as Chief Architect, will focus on pre-training and large-scale model development, and both leaders will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei.
This structure is designed to improve coordination, speed up development, and enhance system reliability.
Infrastructure Competition
Anthropic’s leadership follows major infrastructure upgrades from major companies. Meta and OpenAI have invested heavily in computing capacity to support their AI models.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure through 2028.
OpenAI has also made comparable commitments through its partnership with Oracle and the Stargate project.
Anthropic has not disclosed its own spending figures. However, the company faces pressure to scale efficiently while managing costs and energy use.
Also read: Anthropic’s AI Found Blackmailing Developers in Simulations
Infrastructure Strain
The popularity of Anthropic’s Claude products has created new challenges. Rapid user growth has placed significant strain on the company’s infrastructure.
In July, Anthropic introduced new rate limits for Claude Code as some users had been running the service continuously, which impacted overall performance.
The company now limits Sonnet usage to between 240 and 480 hours per week and Opus 4 usage to between 24 and 40 hours, depending on infrastructure load.
Patil’s Background
Patil brings more than two decades of engineering experience to Anthropic. He previously held senior roles at major technology companies.
Before joining Stripe, he served as Senior Vice President for cloud infrastructure at Oracle. He also held engineering positions at Amazon and Microsoft.
His career has centered on building reliable systems capable of supporting large-scale operations. This expertise aligns closely with Anthropic’s infrastructure priorities.
Leadership Endorsements
Amodei praised Patil’s appointment, emphasizing his proven ability to build dependable systems.
“Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need,” she said.
“I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.”
Patil also expressed enthusiasm about joining the company. “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development,” he said.
“This feels like the most important work I could be doing right now. I can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”
