Anthropic just made a major leadership move. The fast-rising AI lab has brought in Rahul Patil, former Stripe CTO, as its new chief technical officer. Patil officially started this week, stepping into the role previously held by co-founder Sam McCandlish, who’s now shifting to become Anthropic’s chief architect.
This isn’t just a title shuffle — it’s part of a broader restructuring of Anthropic’s technical backbone. Patil will now oversee everything from compute and infrastructure to inference and other key engineering projects. Meanwhile, McCandlish will focus more on the science side, tackling pre-training and large-scale model training — essentially the heavy lifting that makes Anthropic’s Claude models smarter. Both will report directly to president Daniela Amodei.
Why now? Because the AI infrastructure race is heating up. OpenAI and Meta are throwing down billions on compute — Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg even pledged $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure investment through 2028. OpenAI, for its part, has massive contracts with Oracle and Stargate. Compared to that, Anthropic’s infrastructure budget isn’t public, but one thing is clear: pressure is on to scale fast, keep costs lean, and ensure Claude keeps performing under heavy demand.
We already saw this strain earlier in the year when Anthropic had to roll out usage caps on Claude Code. Power users were literally running it 24/7, so limits of 240–480 hours a week for Sonnet and 24–40 hours for Opus 4 were introduced. It was a not-so-subtle reminder that compute is gold in the AI world.
Patil brings serious chops to handle that challenge. With 20+ years across Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and most recently Stripe, he knows how to build rock-solid, enterprise-grade infrastructure. In fact, Amodei praised his “proven track record” in scaling dependable systems for big businesses — exactly what Anthropic needs to position Claude as the enterprise AI platform of choice.
For his part, Patil called the role “the most important work I could be doing right now,” highlighting Anthropic’s mix of cutting-edge research and focus on AI safety.
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