Who is Rahul Patil, the former Stripe exec chosen as Anthropic’s new CTO?

The new CTO hire comes at a time when Anthropic is reportedly looking to enable greater collaboration between its product-engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams as part of its broader restructuring of the firm’s core technical group. In his role as CTO, Patil is expected to oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and a variety of other engineering tasks.

Background in infrastructure, scaling

Patil earned his bachelor’s degree in computer science from PES University (formerly known as PES Institute of Technology (PESIT)) in Bengaluru, Karnataka. He also holds a master’s degree in computer science from Arizona State University and a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the University of Washington in the United States, as per his verified LinkedIn profile.

He has over 20 years of engineering experience working at various tech giants, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle. During his stint at Amazon Web Services (AWS), Patil led the Kinesis team which built large-scaled data processing platforms to enable mobile-app developers, IoT developers, and cloud dev-ops engineers to make sense of their streaming big data in near-real-time.

He served as senior vice president for cloud infrastructure at Oracle, and spent another five years in various technical roles at Stripe. Patil was also part of the ClearTax board for over a year. On his new position at Anthropic, he said, “I am grateful to join the humble, brilliant, hardworking and conscientious crew at Anthropic that has ignited much of the imagination and excitement around the world!”

“AI possibilities seem endless, and it is going to be an extraordinary adventure of discoveries and effort to make these possibilities real. More importantly, it is going to require us to make a conscientious set of decisions every day to safely navigate this massive transformation and ensure that responsible AI wins,” he wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Emphasising Patil’s experience in building stable and scalable infrastructure for large enterprises, Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei said, “Rahul brings a proven track record in building and scaling the kind of dependable infrastructure that businesses need,” the statement reads. “I couldn’t be more excited about what this means for strengthening Claude’s position as the leading intelligence platform for enterprises.”

Why Patil could be key for Anthropic

Patil is expected to lead engineering teams across several key areas such as inference, products, infrastructure, and security. The development comes as Anthropic faces stiff competition from rival AI companies such as OpenAI and Meta, which are pouring billions into setting up AI infrastructure.

Last month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that the social media giant plans to spend $600 billion on building AI infrastructure in the US till 2028. Meanwhile, OpenAI and other players such as Oracle have committed similar amounts as part of the Stargate Project. As a result, Anthropic could face pressure to optimise the infrastructure powering its AI models for better speed and efficient power consumption.

Recently, the Google and Amazon-backed AI startup introduced rate limits to Claude Code after some users were found running the app “continuously in the background, 24/7,” which is said to have put the company’s infrastructure under significant strain. As per the new rules, usage of Sonnet is limited to between 240 and 480 hours for every user while Opus 4 can be accessed for 24-40 hours depending on infrastructure strain.

During an event at Stripe last year, Patil talked about building end-to-end reliable systems. “A key to preventing user impact is accepting that failures are inevitable. So, it’s important to design for failure from the ground up. Every system fails. It’s not if but how. A system should never fall apart under failure, but instead it should allow you to predictably steer it back to stability. Like a circuit breaker, when a system fails, a system needs to rapidly adapt by isolating failures and by converting total failures to partial outages and automatically recover to minimize impact,” he said.

Last week, Anthropic introduced its latest AI model: Claude Sonnet 4.5, which it claimed is the “best coding model in the world.” The new model is said to be better at coding, using computers, and meeting practical business needs. It is also said to excel in specialised fields such as cybersecurity, finance, and research.