Anthropic has a new chief technical officer, former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil. Patil started at the company earlier this week, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will move to a new role as chief architect.
As part of the change, Anthropic is updating the structure of its core technical group, bringing the company’s product-engineering team into closer contact with the infrastructure and inference teams. As CTO, Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and a variety of other engineering tasks. In the chief architect role, McCandlish will work on pre-training and large-scale model training, extending much of his previous work. Both Patil and McCandlish will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
This new leadership structure comes as Anthropic faces intense infrastructure competition from AI labs at OpenAI and Meta, which have invested billions into computing infrastructure. Mark Zuckerberg has said that Meta plans to spend $600 billion on U.S. infrastructure through the end of 2028, and OpenAI has contracted a similar amount through its work with Oracle and the Stargate project. The scale of Anthropic’s own infrastructure spending is less clear, but there will be immense pressure to optimize the growing infrastructure for both speed and power consumption.
