Recently, the AI company Anthropic officially announced the appointment of Rahul Patil as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) to strengthen its layout in the AI infrastructure field. Patil previously served as CTO at payment giant Stripe and started his new role this week. He will take over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will transition to the role of Chief Architect, continuing to focus on large-scale model pre-training.
With this personnel change, Anthropic also restructured its core technical team to enable more efficient collaboration between the product engineering team and the infrastructure and reasoning teams. As the new CTO, Patil will be responsible for computing, infrastructure, and multiple engineering matters, which is crucial for improving the company's overall operational efficiency. Meanwhile, McCandlish will focus on model pre-training, continuing to leverage his technical expertise. These two executives will report directly to Anthropic's president, Daniela Amodei.
This appointment comes amid increasing competition in the AI field, as Anthropic faces significant pressure from companies such as OpenAI and Meta. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has already stated that the company plans to invest $60 billion in infrastructure in the United States by 2028, and OpenAI has also signed a major contract with Oracle. Although Anthropic's specific infrastructure spending has not been disclosed, the pressure in terms of speed and energy consumption optimization cannot be ignored.
In addition, the Claude series products from Anthropic have seen rising popularity, placing a greater burden on the company's infrastructure. In July of this year, to address the heavy usage of Claude Code, Anthropic imposed usage limits to prevent the software from running excessively. According to the new rules, users' weekly Sonnet usage time is limited to between 240 and 480 hours, and Opus4 is limited to 24 to 40 hours, mainly depending on the infrastructure's capacity.
Patil has over 20 years of rich experience in engineering management. He worked at Stripe for five years, and also served as Senior Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure at Oracle, as well as engineering technology positions at companies such as Amazon and Microsoft. Daniela Amodei, president of Anthropic, warmly welcomed Patil's arrival, praising his capabilities in building enterprise infrastructure, and expressing her anticipation for him to further solidify Claude's position as a leading AI platform.
Patil also expressed his excitement, stating that joining Anthropic during this critical stage of AI development is a significant responsibility and honor. He values Anthropic's commitment to AI safety research and hopes to contribute to the company's development.
