Anthropic has announced a key leadership change with the appointment of Rahul Patil, former Stripe CTO, as its new Chief Technical Officer. Company co-founder Sam McCandlish will transition into the role of Chief Architect, focusing on pre-training and large-scale model training. Both executives will report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
Patil, who joined earlier this week, will oversee critical areas including compute, infrastructure, inference, and product engineering—functions that are central to sustaining the growth of Anthropic’s popular Claude AI products. McCandlish, in his new role, will continue to steer the company’s advances in model development and innovation.
The leadership transition comes at a time when Anthropic is navigating intensifying competition from global rivals such as OpenAI and Meta, both of which are investing staggering amounts into computing infrastructure. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure through 2028, while OpenAI has teamed up with Oracle on the ambitious Stargate project. While Anthropic has not disclosed spending figures on the same scale, the rapid adoption of Claude has already resulted in usage caps for heavy users, underscoring the strain on infrastructure.
With over two decades of engineering leadership, Patil brings extensive experience from senior roles at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. Anthropic’s president Daniela Amodei expressed confidence in his appointment, stating: “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.”
Patil also shared his excitement about the move, highlighting the impact of Anthropic’s mission. “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development,” he said. “This feels like the most important work I could be doing right now — I personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”
With this leadership shift, Anthropic is signaling its commitment to scaling infrastructure, strengthening product reliability, and advancing the Claude platform at a time when competition in AI development is at its fiercest. The combined expertise of Patil and McCandlish positions the company to accelerate innovation while ensuring stability in its next phase of growth.
