Anthropic has appointed Rahul Patil, former CTO of Stripe, as its new chief technical officer, marking a significant shift in the company’s engineering leadership. Patil began his role earlier this week, succeeding co-founder Sam McCandlish, who is transitioning to a new position as chief architect. The leadership change is part of a broader restructuring of Anthropic’s technical organization, designed to strengthen collaboration between the company’s product-engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams. As CTO, Patil will lead efforts across compute, infrastructure, model inference, and related engineering functions. McCandlish, in his new role as chief architect, will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training, building on his foundational contributions to the company’s technical roadmap. Both executives will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei. The move comes amid growing pressure on AI companies to scale their infrastructure efficiently. OpenAI and Meta have each committed tens of billions of dollars to computing infrastructure, with Meta pledging $600 billion in U.S. infrastructure investments through 2028 and OpenAI partnering with Oracle on the Stargate project. While Anthropic has not disclosed the full extent of its infrastructure spending, it faces mounting challenges in optimizing performance, energy efficiency, and system reliability. The strain on Anthropic’s infrastructure has already become evident. In July, the company introduced rate limits for its Claude Code service, restricting heavy users. Under the new rules, users are capped at 240 to 480 hours of Sonnet usage per week and 24 to 40 hours of Opus 4 usage, depending on system load—responses to users running the service continuously in the background. Patil brings over 20 years of experience in building scalable, enterprise-grade systems. Prior to Stripe, he held senior cloud infrastructure roles at Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft. His background in high-performance systems and large-scale operations makes him a strategic fit for Anthropic’s mission to deliver robust, reliable AI infrastructure. In a statement, Amodei highlighted Patil’s proven ability to build resilient systems. “Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need,” she said. “I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.” Patil expressed enthusiasm for the opportunity, praising Anthropic’s research excellence and commitment to AI safety. “I’m thrilled to join Anthropic at this pivotal moment in AI development,” he said. “I personally can’t think of a greater calling and responsibility.”