From Bengaluru's PES University to Anthropic: Rahul Patil is the new CTO

Anthropic CTO Rahul Patil

Anthropic has appointed Indian-origin tech infrastructure veteran Rahul Patil as its chief technology officer (CTO), as the artificial intelligence (AI) research company looks to bolster its infrastructure amid intensifying rivalry with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, and Meta.

What is Rahul Patil's role?

Patil will lead the company's engineering function, spanning inference, products, infrastructure, and security. He takes over from co-founder Sam McCandlish who is moving to a new role as chief architect.

"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," Patil said in a post on LinkedIn on October 2.

From PES University to Anthropic

Patil joins Anthropic from fintech giant Stripe where he spent about five and a half years in multiple roles, most recently as CTO, overseeing its engineering and global operations. He has also had stints at Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft Azure.

Patil holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Bengaluru's PES University, (formerly PES Institute of Technology). He also has a master’s degree in computer science from Arizona State University and an MBA from the University of Washington.

What are the changes Anthropic is making to its tech structure?

Along with this appointment, Anthropic is restructuring its core technical group, integrating its product engineering team more closely with the infrastructure and inference teams, a TechCrunch report said.

In his new role, McCandlish will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training. Both executives will report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, it stated.

Surging demand for Claude AI models

Patil's appointment comes amid surging demand for Anthropic's Claude AI models across the world.

In September, Anthropic said its global customer base has grown from fewer than 1,000 business customers two years ago to over 300,000, a more than 300-fold growth. The company's run-rate revenue has also grown, rising from $87 million at the start of 2024 to around $1 billion at the beginning of 2025. It surpassed $5 billion in August.

Nearly 80 percent of consumer Claude usage is also coming from outside the United States, with per person usage in countries such as South Korea, Australia, and Singapore outpacing that of America, as per Anthropic’s recent Economic Index report.

Anthropic's India plans

On September 26, Anthropic announced that it will triple its international workforce and expand its applied artificial intelligence team fivefold this year. The company is also looking to establish a foothold in India, along with other markets such as Australia and New Zealand, Korea, and Singapore.

This move came shortly after the firm raised $13 billion at a $183 billion post-money valuation, led by investment company Iconiq.

Earlier this week, Anthropic unveiled its latest AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, which it claims is the world’s most powerful AI model for coding and building complex AI agents. The company stated that the AI model is capable of building 'production-ready' applications.

Tech giants such as Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Microsoft have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into computing infrastructure as they seek to outdo one another in debuting their next-generation frontier models in the rapidly escalating AI arms race

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