Anthropic has announced a significant update to its leadership structure, appointing Rahul Patil, formerly the Chief Technology Officer at Stripe, as its new Chief Technical Officer. Patil commenced his role earlier this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will transition into the newly created position of Chief Architect. Both Patil and McCandlish will report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.

This organizational shift also includes a restructuring of Anthropic’s core technical group, aiming to foster closer collaboration between the company’s product-engineering team and its infrastructure and inference teams. As CTO, Rahul Patil will be responsible for overseeing critical areas such as compute, infrastructure, inference, and a broad spectrum of other engineering functions. Sam McCandlish, in his capacity as Chief Architect, will concentrate on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending his previous work in these areas.

The leadership changes come at a time when Anthropic is navigating an intensely competitive landscape in AI infrastructure. Rival AI labs, including OpenAI and Meta, have committed billions to developing their computing infrastructure. Notably, Mark Zuckerberg has outlined Meta’s plan to invest $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure by the end of 2028, while OpenAI has secured similar substantial contracts through its collaboration with Oracle and the Stargate project. This environment places immense pressure on Anthropic to optimize its own expanding infrastructure for both speed and power efficiency.

Furthermore, the growing popularity of Anthropic’s Claude products has already strained the company’s existing infrastructure. In response to high demand, particularly from power users, Anthropic implemented new rate limits for Claude Code in July. These new rules cap usage for Sonnet at 240 to 480 hours per week and for Opus 4 at 24 to 40 hours per week, with specific limits depending on the prevailing infrastructure strain.

Rahul Patil brings over two decades of extensive engineering experience to Anthropic, particularly in building robust infrastructure. His impressive career includes five years in technical leadership roles at Stripe, a tenure as Senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle, and prior engineering positions at industry giants Amazon and Microsoft.

In a statement regarding the appointment, Daniela Amodei emphasized Patil’s proven expertise: “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.” Echoing this sentiment, Rahul Patil expressed his enthusiasm, stating, “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development,” and highlighted his belief 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,” while also commending Anthropic’s research and commitment to AI safety.