anthropic hires new cto with focus on ai infrastructure

Anthropic Appoints New Chief Technical Officer

Anthropic has announced the appointment of Rahul Patil as its new chief technical officer. Patil, formerly the CTO of Stripe, commenced his role earlier this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish.

McCandlish will transition into a newly created position as chief architect, focusing on long-term strategic initiatives.

Restructuring of the Technical Group

This leadership change is accompanied by a restructuring of Anthropic’s core technical teams. The company’s product-engineering division will now operate in closer alignment with the infrastructure and inference teams.

As CTO, Patil will be responsible for overseeing critical engineering functions, including compute, infrastructure, and inference.

Focus on Infrastructure and Model Training

In his role as chief architect, McCandlish will concentrate on pre-training and the training of large-scale models. This will build upon his previous contributions to the company’s AI development.

Both Patil and McCandlish will report directly to Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic.

Intensifying Infrastructure Competition

The leadership adjustments occur amidst increasing competition in AI infrastructure. Companies like OpenAI and Meta are making substantial investments in computing resources.

Meta, for example, has projected spending up to $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure by the end of 2028, while OpenAI has committed significant funds through its partnership with Oracle and the Stargate project.

While Anthropic’s infrastructure expenditure remains less public, optimizing its infrastructure for both speed and energy efficiency is paramount.

Claude's Popularity and Infrastructure Strain

The growing popularity of Anthropic’s Claude products has already placed considerable demands on its infrastructure.

In July, the company implemented new rate limits for Claude Code to address intensive usage patterns, specifically targeting users who were running the application continuously.

These new rules limit Sonnet usage to 240-480 hours weekly and Opus 4 usage to 24-40 hours, contingent on infrastructure capacity.

Patil’s Extensive Experience

Rahul Patil brings over two decades of experience in various engineering capacities to Anthropic.

Prior to joining Anthropic, he held technical positions at Stripe for five years and served as a Senior Vice President for cloud infrastructure at Oracle.

His career also includes engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

Amodei’s Statement on the Appointment

Daniela Amodei highlighted Patil’s expertise in building robust infrastructure for businesses. She stated that his “proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need” will be invaluable.

Amodei expressed excitement about Patil’s contribution to strengthening Claude’s position as a leading intelligence platform for enterprises.

Patil’s Enthusiasm for Anthropic

Patil expressed his admiration for Anthropic’s research and dedication to AI safety. He described joining the company as a “pivotal moment in AI development.”

He further stated that his work at Anthropic “feels like the most important work I could be doing right now,” emphasizing his sense of purpose and responsibility.