Anthropic hires new CTO with focus on AI infrastructure | TechCrunch
Key Takeaways
- Anthropic appointed former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as the new Chief Technical Officer (CTO).
- Co-founder Sam McCandlish is stepping down as CTO to become the new Chief Architect, focusing on model training.
- The change involves restructuring the technical group to better integrate product-engineering with infrastructure teams.
- The leadership shift occurs amid intense infrastructure competition from major AI labs like OpenAI and Meta.
- Patil brings significant prior experience in cloud infrastructure from roles at Stripe, Oracle, Amazon, and Microsoft.
Anthropic has announced a significant leadership change, appointing former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new Chief Technical Officer, taking over from co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will now serve as Chief Architect focusing on model training. This transition is accompanied by an update to the core technical group's structure, aiming to foster closer collaboration between product-engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams. The move comes as Anthropic navigates fierce infrastructure competition, with rivals like OpenAI and Meta committing massive investments to computing power. Patil's extensive background, including roles at Stripe and Oracle, is seen as vital for optimizing Anthropicâs growing infrastructure for speed and power efficiency, especially as the popularity of Claude products strains current resources, evidenced by recent rate limits imposed on users. Anthropic President Daniela Amodei expressed excitement over Patil's proven track record in building dependable infrastructure necessary for strengthening Claude's enterprise position. Patil himself emphasized his commitment to AI safety and viewed the role as the most important work he could undertake at this pivotal moment in AI development.
