Hajra Naz
Anthropic has a new chief technical officer: Rahul Patil, the former CTO of Stripe. He joined the company this week, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who is moving into a new role as chief architect.
Leadership Changes at Anthropic
With this shift, Anthropic is also restructuring its core technical group. The product-engineering team will now work more closely with the infrastructure and inference teams.
As CTO, Patil will oversee:
-
Compute
-
Infrastructure
-
Inference
-
Other engineering projects
McCandlish, as chief architect, will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training, continuing the work he has led in the past. Both leaders will report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
Read More: Anthropic Unveils Claude Sonnet 4.5, Aiming for Production-Ready AI Coding
Why This Matters
The new structure comes as Anthropic faces heavy competition in AI infrastructure from rivals like OpenAI and Meta.
-
Meta: Mark Zuckerberg has announced plans to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure by 2028.
-
OpenAI: Working with Oracle and the Stargate project on similar large-scale investments.
-
Anthropic: Its spending is less public, but the pressure is clear; the company must grow fast while keeping costs and power use efficient.
Strain on Anthropic’s Systems
Anthropic’s Claude products are growing fast, but this success has strained its systems.
In July, the company introduced new rate limits for Claude Code, targeting heavy users who ran the tool nonstop.
The new limits include:
-
Sonnet usage: 240–480 hours per week
-
Opus 4 usage: 24–40 hours per week
These changes were meant to balance demand with system capacity.
Who Is Rahul Patil?
Rahul Patil has more than 20 years of engineering experience:
-
5 years at Stripe, where he served as CTO
-
Senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle
-
Engineering roles at Amazon and Microsoft
This background makes him well-prepared to manage Anthropic’s growing infrastructure needs.
What Leaders Are Saying
Daniela Amodei, Anthropic’s president, praised Patil’s experience:
“Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling dependable infrastructure for businesses. I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.”
Rahul Patil himself added:
“I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development. This feels like the most important work I could be doing right now — I can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”
Read More: Anthropic Launches Claude AI Agent in Chrome as Browser Wars Heat Up
FAQs
Q1: Who is the new CTO of Anthropic?
Rahul Patil, former CTO of Stripe, joined Anthropic as chief technical officer in October 2025.
Q2: What role will Sam McCandlish play now?
He has moved into the position of chief architect, focusing on pre-training and large-scale model training.
Q3: Why did Anthropic restructure its teams?
The company wants closer collaboration between product engineering, infrastructure, and inference to improve efficiency and scale.
Q4: What challenges does Anthropic face?
Anthropic is competing with massive infrastructure investments from Meta and OpenAI while managing strain from growing usage of its Claude products.
Q5: What experience does Rahul Patil bring?
He has over two decades of experience, including leadership roles at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft, with a focus on building large-scale infrastructure.
