AI startup Anthropic appoints Indian-origin Rahul Patil as CTO: All about the non-IITian executive

AI startup Anthropic has named former Stripe executive Rahul Patil as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

Patil will succeed co-founder Sam McCandlish at the AI company. McCandlish will transition to the role of Chief Architect. He will oversee compute, infrastructure, inference, and broader engineering operations, while McCandlish will focus on pre-training and large-scale model training. Both report to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei.

The leadership change appears to be aimed at enhancing collaboration between Anthropic’s engineering, infrastructure, and inference teams, as demand for its Claude AI models continues to grow.

Who is Rahul Patil?

Patil has had over 20 years of engineering experience. Prior to Anthropic, he was serving as CTO at Stripe and had been with the payments company for a little less than 6 years now. Before that, he was working as a senior VP for cloud infrastructure at Oracle and he held key roles at Amazon and Microsoft.

What makes Patil’s rise notable is that, unlike many Indian-origin executives reaching the top echelons, he did not study at an IIT.

Patil holds a Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) in Computer Science from PESIT, Karnataka. He then went on to pursue a Master of Science (M.S.) in Computer Science from Arizona State University in 2003, and an MBA from the University of Washington.

“I am excited to join a new mission and calling—Anthropic! 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. 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,” Patil wrote in a LinkedIn post today.

It is often said that premier institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) provide opportunities that non-elite institutes cannot, including higher starting salaries, accelerated career growth, and access to exceptional peers. However, in today’s evolving landscape, this advantage appears to be changing.

“To every single Stripe team member who built Stripe before me and with me—thank you for an incredibly transformative 5+ years! I leave with immense gratitude and a profound belief in Stripe's mission. It has been an absolute privilege to serve our users and to work alongside such a brilliant team, building foundational infrastructure for the internet economy. I can’t wait to see what you all build next,” he added.