Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure — former Stripe executive Rahul Patil, who officially joined the company this week. Patil takes over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who transitions into a new role as Chief Architect, signaling a major restructuring of Anthropic’s engineering leadership.
Image Credits:Anthropic
A New Era Of Technical Leadership
Patil’s appointment marks a strategic move as Anthropic scales its AI systems to meet surging demand. The company plans to integrate its product-engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams under a single leadership umbrella.
As the new CTO, Patil will oversee compute optimization, AI infrastructure, and inference operations — the backbone of Anthropic’s Claude AI ecosystem. Meanwhile, McCandlish will focus on large-scale model training and pre-training architecture, continuing his deep involvement in core model development. Both executives will report directly to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei.
Why The Change Matters For Anthropic
The leadership shift comes at a time when Anthropic faces intense competition from OpenAI and Meta, both of which are making record-breaking infrastructure investments.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg recently announced plans to spend $600 billion on U.S.-based AI infrastructure by 2028. Similarly, OpenAI’s collaboration with Oracle on the Stargate project could match that scale. While Anthropic’s exact infrastructure budget remains undisclosed, analysts suggest the company must optimize every dollar for speed, scalability, and energy efficiency.
Addressing Claude’s Rapid Growth And Infrastructure Strain
The rise of Claude, Anthropic’s flagship AI assistant, has already tested the company’s servers. In July, Anthropic introduced new rate limits for its Claude Code product, targeting users who were running the model continuously.
Under the updated usage rules, power users can now access between 240 and 480 hours of Claude Sonnet per week, and 24 to 40 hours of Claude Opus 4, depending on real-time infrastructure strain.
This move underscores Anthropic’s ongoing effort to balance user demand with infrastructure sustainability — a priority area for the new CTO.
Rahul Patil’s Engineering Experience
With over 20 years of experience across high-growth tech companies, Patil brings deep expertise in distributed systems, scalable computing, and AI-driven infrastructure.
At Stripe, he led teams responsible for global reliability and platform performance — experience that will be critical as Anthropic expands its Claude models and underlying AI infrastructure to compete globally.
Looking Ahead: Building The Next Generation Of AI Infrastructure
As Anthropic hires a new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure, the company aims to strengthen the foundation of its rapidly growing AI ecosystem. Patil’s leadership will likely accelerate Anthropic’s path toward more efficient compute scaling, sustainable infrastructure, and next-generation AI capabilities.
With global competition heating up, this leadership shift could mark a turning point for how Anthropic approaches the technical and operational challenges of scaling frontier AI models in 2025 and beyond.
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