Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure

Anthropic has appointed Rahul Patil, the former Chief Technology Officer at Stripe, as its new CTO. Patil began his tenure at the company this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who transitions into a role as chief architect. This leadership shift is part of a broader restructuring aimed at enhancing collaboration between the product-engineering team and the infrastructure and inference teams. In his new position, Patil will be responsible for overseeing critical functions such as compute, infrastructure, inference, and various engineering tasks. Meanwhile, McCandlish will continue to leverage his expertise in model training and pre-training processes in his chief architect role. Both leaders will report directly to Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei. This leadership change comes during a time of heightened competition in AI infrastructure, particularly from major players like OpenAI and Meta, both of which have invested heavily in their computing capabilities. Meta, for instance, has announced plans to allocate $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure through 2028, while OpenAI has engaged in similar financial commitments through collaborations with Oracle and the Stargate project. Although the specifics of Anthropic's infrastructure spending remain ambiguous, the pressure to optimize for speed and efficiency is mounting. The increasing popularity of the company's Claude products has already strained their existing infrastructure. In response, Anthropic introduced new rate limits for Claude Code in July, aimed at managing usage among power users who were utilizing the app continuously. Patil brings over two decades of engineering experience to his new role, having previously held key positions at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. Amodei highlighted Patil's expertise in developing robust infrastructure solutions, stating, "Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need. I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises." Expressing his enthusiasm for joining Anthropic, Patil remarked on the crucial moment in AI development, stating, “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development. This work feels like the most important work I could be doing right now — I personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”