Anthropic Appoints New CTO Rahul Patil Amid Launch of Advanced AI Model Claude Sonnet 4.5
Anthropic reshapes leadership with Rahul Patil as CTO while debuting the advanced AI model Claude Sonnet 4.5, positioning itself strongly against OpenAI.
- • Rahul Patil named CTO, succeeding Sam McCandlish who becomes Chief Architect.
- • Claude Sonnet 4.5 is Anthropic's most advanced AI model focused on enterprise automation and coding.
- • The AI model outperforms OpenAI's GPT-5 on key coding benchmarks with 77.2% on SWE-bench Verified.
- • Claude Sonnet 4.5 can sustain complex tasks for over 30 continuous hours, showcasing long-term reasoning capabilities.
- • The leadership and product changes reflect Anthropic’s strategy to compete strongly in the AI market and expand its client base.
Key details
Anthropic, the San Francisco-based AI startup, has recently undergone a significant leadership restructuring while launching its new AI model, Claude Sonnet 4.5. Rahul Patil, a PES Institute of Technology graduate with prior CTO experience at Stripe and senior VP at Oracle, has been named Anthropic's new Chief Technology Officer. He replaces co-founder Sam McCandlish, who will transition to the role of Chief Architect to focus on AI pre-training and large-scale model development. This leadership change is part of Anthropic’s strategic effort to better align its product engineering and AI infrastructure teams.
Simultaneously, Anthropic has unveiled Claude Sonnet 4.5, its most advanced AI model designed for enterprise automation and coding tasks. This model aims to replace enterprise apps like Slack by autonomously coding, running workflows, and handling complex, multi-step tasks for over 30 consecutive hours, marking a notable advance in long-term reasoning capabilities. On coding benchmarks, Claude Sonnet 4.5 scored an impressive 77.2% on the SWE-bench Verified test, outperforming OpenAI's GPT-5, and can reach up to 82% accuracy with enhanced computing power. It also achieved a 50% score on the Terminal-bench test, claimed as industry-leading by Anthropic.
The launch of Claude Sonnet 4.5 comes just seven weeks after OpenAI introduced GPT-5, underscoring fierce competition in the AI industry for enterprise market dominance. Despite Elon Musk's public skepticism about Anthropic's chances of success, the company's launch and management overhaul reflect ambitions to expand beyond its core client base and assert itself as a competitive player in the AI landscape.
Rahul Patil expressed excitement about his new role, emphasizing the limitless potential of AI. The restructuring aims to unite the compute, infrastructure, inference, and engineering operations under Patil's leadership, while McCandlish focuses on AI model advancements, with both reporting to Anthropic president Daniela Amodei. This dual development in leadership and cutting-edge AI technology positions Anthropic strategically amid increasing industry rivalry.