Anthropic Appoints Rahul Patil as New CTO, Focusing on AI Infrastructure

Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure | TechCrunch

Anthropic has a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil. Patil started at the company earlier this week, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as Chief Architect. As part of the change, Anthropic is updating the structure of its core technical group, bringing the company's product-engineering team into closer contact with the infrastructure and inference teams. As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and a variety of other engineering tasks. In the chief architect role, McCandlish will work on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending much of his previous work. Both Patil and McCandlish will report to Anthropic President Daniela Amodei This new leadership structure comes as Anthropic faces intense infrastructure competition from AI labs at OpenAI and Meta, which have invested billions into computing infrastructure. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta plans to spend $600 billion on US infrastructure through the end of 2028, and OpenAI has contracted a similar amount through its work with Oracle and the Stargate project. The scale of Anthropic's own infrastructure spending is less clear, but there will be immense pressure to optimize the growing infrastructure for both speed and power consumption. At the same time, the popularity of Anthropic's Claude products has already put the company's infrastructure under significant strain. In July, the company introduced new rate limits to Claude Code, with an eye towards power users who had been running the app "continuously in the background, 24/7." Under the new rules, users are limited to between 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet usage each week, and 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4 usage, depending on infrastructure strain. With more than 20 years in different engineering roles, Patil brings significant infrastructure experience to Anthropic. He previously spent five years in technical roles at Stripe, and served as a senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle. He has also held engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft. In a statement, Anthropic President Daniela Amodei emphasized Patil's experience building stable infrastructure for enterprises. "Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need," the statement reads. "I couldn't be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude's position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises." In a paired statement, Patil applauded Anthropic's research and commitment to AI safety. "I'm thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development," Patil said, adding that his work at the company "feels like the most important work I could be doing right now -- I personally can't think of a greater calling and responsibility.

Meet Rahul Patil, the new CTO of AI firm Anthropic

Before joining Anthropic, Patil held multiple roles including deputy CTO, CTO, and head of infrastructure and global operations during his five-year stint at digital payments firm Stripe. In his new role, Patil will reportedly look at the engineering side of the firm including compute and infrastructure. Anthropic has appointed Rahul Patil as the new CTO. He will succeed cofounder Sam McCandlish in this role, and McCandlish will become the chief architect of the company. Confirming the development on LinkedIn, Patil wrote: "I am grateful to join the humble, brilliant, hardworking, and conscientious crew at Anthropic that has ignited much of the imagination and excitement around the world!" Before joining Anthropic, Patil held multiple roles including deputy CTO, CTO, and head of infrastructure and global operations during his five-year stint at digital payments firm Stripe. "I leave with immense gratitude and a profound belief in Stripe's mission. It has been an absolute privilege to serve our users and to work alongside such a brilliant team, building foundational infrastructure for the internet economy'', his post read. In his new role, Patil will reportedly look at the engineering side of the firm including compute and infrastructure, whereas McCandlish will drive AI growth, including pre-training and training AI models. Who is Rahul Patil? India-born Patil did his engineering from PES University, Bengaluru. In 2003, he went abroad for higher education, and did his MS from Arizona State University, Tempe. He later completed his MBA from the University of Washington in 2013. Patil's career Patil spent nearly nine years in engineering and managerial roles at Microsoft. In 2014, he became manager at Amazon Kinesis, a part of the AWS cloud ecosystem. Here, he scaled data processing platforms to help mobile app and IoT developers, and cloud DevOps engineers, analyse streaming big data in near real-time. After nearly two years, he joined Oracle Cloud Infrastructure as senior vice president, overseeing engineering, product management, and business operations for over 30 products across compute, storage, security, and monitoring services. Later, he was appointed to the board of Clear Tax, an Indian fintech, for nearly two years. The Stripe chapter At Stripe he oversaw two core functions: engineering and global operations. His mission for Stripe was to make it both the fastest-evolving financial infrastructure for developers and the most dependable company for its partners, per his LinkedIn post. Stripe, with global revenues of $65 billion in 2024 from $50 billion in 2023, has been present in India since 2016, but seen limited scale so far. The payments firm received the payment aggregator's licence from RBI in January 2024. The company was in discussions to go public in the US in 2021 after clocking a $95 billion valuation, but that didn't pan out. In January, Stripe laid off 300 employees, primarily in product and operations roles, though some in engineering were also affected. This was the second round of layoffs at Stripe in recent years. In November 2022, the company let go 1,120 employees, representing 14% of its workforce at the time. The way ahead -- Anthropic Anthropic is now valued at $183 billion after raising $13 billion in a funding round led by ICONIQ, with support from investors like Fidelity, Lightspeed, Amazon, and Qatar Investment Authority. Anthropic's revenue run-rate, which had grown to approximately $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, was more than $5 billion by August, according to a company blog. US startup funding has seen a 75.6% surge in the first half of 2025, driven mostly by AI investment, making this year potentially the second-best year for startup funding. In July, Reuters reported that Amazon is considering another multibillion-dollar investment in Anthropic to strengthen their strategic partnership, expanding its investment beyond the $8 billion already committed in November last year.