Sam McCandlish

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Sam McCandlish is a machine learning researcher and theoretical physicist who co-founded Anthropic. He studied at Brandeis University and Stanford University, where he earned recognition in physics and later completed a PhD in 2017 with work on holography. He has co-authored papers in high-energy theory and holography, including studies related to AdS/CFT.

At OpenAI, McCandlish contributed to research on training large neural networks and how training scales with batch size and other factors. He was involved in a 2018 post about how AI training scales and in work on large-batch training and scaling behavior in neural language models.

In 2023, VentureBeat discussed Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy (RSP), a framework aimed at managing catastrophic-risk thresholds for frontier AI systems. Business Insider in 2024 described him as Anthropic’s chief technology officer and Responsible Scaling Officer. In October 2024, Anthropic announced that Jared Kaplan would take over the Responsible Scaling Officer role, succeeding McCandlish. In October 2025, TechCrunch reported that McCandlish moved from CTO to chief architect as Rahul Patil became CTO, with the company confirming the transition.