Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure (techcrunch.com)

Anthropic has hired former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new chief technical officer, with co‑founder Sam McCandlish moving to a new Chief Architect role focused on pre‑training and large‑scale model training. The company is reorganizing its core technical group to bring product engineering into closer alignment with infrastructure and inference teams; Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference and related engineering functions, while both will report to President Daniela Amodei. The move signals Anthropic’s push to harden and optimize deployment at scale amid fierce infrastructure competition from OpenAI and Meta (Mark Zuckerberg has cited roughly $600B in U.S. infrastructure spend through 2028, with OpenAI striking comparable large‑scale deals). Anthropic’s Claude lineup has already strained capacity—recent rate limits capped Sonnet at 240–480 hours/week and Opus 4 at 24–40 hours/week for heavy users—so the leadership change emphasizes throughput, latency and power‑efficiency engineering. Patil brings 20+ years of infrastructure experience (Stripe, Oracle cloud infra, Amazon, Microsoft), suggesting a pragmatic shift toward enterprise‑grade reliability, cost and energy optimization while McCandlish continues to advance pre‑training research and model scaling.