Anthropic has tapped Rahul Patil, former chief technology officer at Stripe, as its new CTO in a move aimed at strengthening the company’s AI infrastructure. Patil stepped into the role this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who shifts to a new position as chief architect.
The leadership change comes with a structural update to Anthropic’s technical organization. The product-engineering group will now work more closely with the infrastructure and inference teams, a shift designed to streamline operations as the company scales its AI products. As CTO, Patil will oversee infrastructure, compute, inference, and other engineering priorities, while McCandlish will continue to focus on pre-training and large-scale model development. Both executives report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
This transition arrives at a time when the competition for AI infrastructure is intensifying. OpenAI and Meta have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to building massive computing systems, setting new benchmarks in scale and efficiency. Mark Zuckerberg has publicly stated that Meta plans to invest $600 billion into U.S. infrastructure by 2028, while OpenAI is working with Oracle on its Stargate project at a comparable scale. Anthropic has not disclosed its exact spending, but analysts note that the company faces heavy pressure to optimize for both performance and power efficiency.
The strain of rapid growth is already visible. Earlier this year, Anthropic introduced rate limits for Claude Code to prevent continuous 24/7 usage. Power users now face limits of 240 to 480 hours per week for Claude Sonnet and 24 to 40 hours for Opus 4, depending on system demand.
Patil brings more than two decades of experience in cloud and infrastructure engineering. Before joining Anthropic, he spent five years at Stripe and served as senior vice president of cloud infrastructure at Oracle. His career also includes roles at Amazon and Microsoft, giving him a deep background in scaling mission-critical systems.
Amodei praised the hire, highlighting Patil’s ability to deliver reliable enterprise infrastructure. She noted that his leadership will help solidify Claude as a trusted AI platform for businesses. For his part, Patil described his new role as a chance to contribute to one of the most meaningful challenges in technology today. He said joining Anthropic “feels like the most important work I could be doing right now” and underscored the company’s ongoing focus on safety and research.
With the appointment, Anthropic signals that it is doubling down on the backbone of its AI systems, preparing to compete with rivals whose infrastructure ambitions are already reshaping the future of artificial intelligence.
