Anthropic has appointed Rahul Patil, former CTO of Stripe, as its new chief technical officer. Patil began his role earlier this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will transition to the newly created role of chief architect.
The leadership changes come with a structural update to Anthropic’s technical organization, aligning its product-engineering team more closely with infrastructure and inference groups. As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and other core engineering functions. McCandlish, in his new position, will continue his work on pre-training and large-scale model training. Both leaders will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
The shift comes amid fierce competition in AI infrastructure, as OpenAI and Meta commit billions of dollars toward expanding their computing capacity. While Anthropic’s own spending remains undisclosed, demand for its Claude products has already placed heavy strain on its systems. Earlier this year, Anthropic introduced new usage limits on Claude Code to balance resource allocation for power users.
Patil brings more than two decades of engineering leadership experience, with past roles at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. Amodei praised his track record in enterprise infrastructure, saying: “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.”
Related: Anthropic Unveils Claude Sonnet 4.5 With State-of-the-Art Coding Performance
Patil, meanwhile, described the role as a unique opportunity. “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 personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”
