Anthropic just made a major play in the AI infrastructure wars. The Claude maker hired former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new chief technical officer, signaling the company's urgent push to scale its compute resources as demand for its AI assistant explodes and rivals pour billions into infrastructure.
Anthropic just reshuffled its technical leadership at a critical moment. Former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil started this week as the AI company's new chief technical officer, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who's moving to a newly created Chief Architect role. The leadership change comes as Anthropic faces mounting pressure to scale its infrastructure amid exploding demand for its Claude AI assistant and brutal competition from better-funded rivals.
The restructuring brings Anthropic's product-engineering team into closer contact with its infrastructure and inference teams - a telling sign of how critical compute optimization has become. Patil will oversee the company's entire technical stack, from compute and infrastructure to inference systems, while McCandlish focuses on pre-training and large-scale model development. Both report directly to President Daniela Amodei.
The timing isn't coincidental. Anthropic is getting crushed in the infrastructure arms race that's defining AI's next phase. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to spend $600 billion on US infrastructure through 2028, while OpenAI has committed similar amounts through partnerships with Oracle and the ambitious Stargate project. Anthropic's infrastructure spending remains largely opaque, but the pressure to optimize for both speed and power consumption is immense.
The company's infrastructure is already showing strain. In July, Anthropic imposed new usage limits on Claude Code after power users began running the app "continuously in the background, 24/7." The restrictions cap users at 240-480 hours of Sonnet usage weekly and just 24-40 hours of the more powerful Opus model, depending on infrastructure load.
Patil brings exactly the kind of enterprise-scale experience needs. His five years at included architecting payment infrastructure that handles millions of transactions daily without fail. Before that, he served as senior VP for cloud infrastructure at and held engineering roles at and - companies that know a thing or two about scaling compute resources.
