The world AI adds another Indian-origin talent to look after one of the industry’s biggest names – Anthropic. The company, which is responsible for creating Claude LLM, has announced a major leadership restructuring, appointing former Stripe Chief Technology Officer Rahul Patil as its new CTO. Patil, who is a veteran engineering and infrastructure executive, steps into the role previously held by co-founder Sam McCandlish.
Patil will now oversee critical operational areas, including compute, infrastructure, and inference, alongside other core engineering responsibilities. Co-founder Sam McCandlish is now transitioning to the role of Chief Architect, where he will concentrate on pre-training and the increasingly demanding task of large-scale model training.
Both executives will report directly to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.
Rahul Patil: Who is he?
Rahul Patil brings a wealth of experience from the highest levels of the tech world. Prior to his tenure as CTO at the fintech giant Stripe, Patil served as a senior vice president at Oracle. His educational journey began in India, where he earned a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Science from PESIT, Karnataka, before moving to the US to obtain a master’s degree in Computer Science from Arizona State University and an MBA from the University of Washington.
His appointment has drawn attention on social media, with many highlighting his success as a graduate of an Indian university other than the elite IITs.
Expressing his enthusiasm for the new role on LinkedIn, Patil stated, “AI possibilities seem endless, and it is going to be an extraordinary adventure of discoveries and effort to make these possibilities real.”
What’s in it for Anthropic?
The hiring of an executive with deep experience in scaling massive financial infrastructure, such as Patil’s background at Stripe, signals Anthropic’s renewed focus on the technical backbone required to sustain and advance its cutting-edge AI models. The restructuring comes at a critical time for the company, which is engaged in an intense infrastructure battle against wealthy rivals like OpenAI and Meta, both of whom have announced mega investment plans – valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars – to build dedicated AI factories.
As told to Techcrunch, this leadership shakeup is designed to facilitate a closer working relationship between Anthropic’s product-engineering teams and its infrastructure and inference divisions. This synergy is essential for optimising the performance and deployment of its models, especially following the recent launch of its latest generation model, Claude Sonnet 4.5.
