Sam McCandlish

Career

1. 
   Anthropic

   • Co-founder and Chief ArchitectOct 2025 – present
   • Co-founder and Chief Technology OfficerJan 2021 – Oct 2025
2. 
   OpenAI

   • Member of Technical StaffMay 2018 – Dec 2020
3. 
   Boston University

   • Postdoctoral FellowJan 2017 – Dec 2018

Education

• PhD, Theoretical Physics, Stanford University, 2017
• BS (Math & Physics) and MS (Physics), Brandeis University, 2012

Lesser-known facts

• PhD in theoretical physics from Stanford (2017), on quantum gravity and tensor networks.
• Has more than 100,000 citations on Google Scholar.
• Earned both a BS in math and physics and an MS in physics at Brandeis before his Stanford PhD.
• Did an AI safety fellowship at OpenAI and went on to build its science-of-AI team.
• First-authored "An Empirical Model of Large-Batch Training" (2018), which introduced the gradient noise scale for predicting useful batch size.
• Served as Anthropic's CTO until October 2025, when Rahul Patil took the title and he became Chief Architect.
• Said of the founding: "None of us initially set out to found a company. We simply felt it was our responsibility."

Research papers before Anthropic

• GPT-3: Language Models are Few-Shot Learners2020 · author 28 of 31
• Scaling Laws for Autoregressive Generative Modeling2020 · author 19 of 19
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models2020 · author 2 of 10

Known for

• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners (2020)
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (2020)
• Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code (2021)
• Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback (2022)

Interviews and talks

• Building Anthropic: a conversation with the co-founders (2024)youtube.com