The CTO of Workday has exchanged his executive position for a technical staff role at Anthropic.

      In summary: Peter Bailis, who became Workday's chief technology officer in May 2025, left the company last month to join Anthropic as a member of the technical staff, focusing on reinforcement learning engineering. This transition involves stepping down from a C-suite position to engage more directly with cutting-edge technology, while joining a company that is actively developing HR software similar to Workday's offerings.

      An Anthropic spokesperson confirmed this hire, which Business Insider reported. Bailis’s name has been removed from Workday's leadership pages, and his LinkedIn reflects the change. Previously, Bailis was vice president of engineering at Google Cloud, where he led initiatives in AI for data, including Conversational Analytics, NL2SQL, and retrieval-augmented generation for structured data. He also founded Sisu Data, a decision intelligence firm, and was an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University, co-leading the DAWN project on data-intensive applications. His expertise in data systems combined with recent enterprise AI experience at Google Cloud makes him a distinctive choice for a reinforcement learning role, indicating Anthropic's aim to merge model training with practical product development.

      Bailis’s new position, member of technical staff (MTS), is a standard engineering title at Anthropic and OpenAI, applicable across both research and engineering roles irrespective of seniority. OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman has explained that this title reflects a flat technical hierarchy rather than a demotion. The MTS role covers a wide range of seniority levels and salary scales, with MTS base salaries at Anthropic ranging from about $300,000 to $405,000, and at OpenAI from approximately $210,000 to $530,000, with equity options pushing total compensation into the seven figures for higher-level roles.

      For Bailis, this trade-off is clear. While a CTO role at a company like Workday, with $8 billion in annual revenue and 18,000 employees, carries significant authority, the individual contributor role at an AI lab offers direct engagement with model development, training decisions, and research methods without the hurdles of organizational management. Anthropic is now reporting a revenue run rate exceeding $30 billion, serving over 1,000 enterprise customers each spending more than $1 million annually, positioning it as a significant player in the space beyond just a research lab.

      Bailis’s work at Anthropic will focus on reinforcement learning engineering, which is crucial for model alignment and agent behavior. He brings extensive knowledge of the enterprise software sector, particularly as Anthropic begins to expand into that space as a product company rather than just an API provider. Reports indicate his arrival aligns with Anthropic's efforts to develop HR applications, such as Claude plugins for generating job descriptions and onboarding materials. Bailis has spent years in enterprise HR and finance software, first at Google Cloud and then as Workday’s CTO, where he directed AI strategies, providing him with invaluable expertise for Anthropic's enterprise product roadmap.

      There is an ironic twist in that Workday's CEO, Carl Eschenbach, noted in February 2026 that Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI all utilize Workday’s software internally. The company that previously purchased licenses from Workday is now employing its former CTO to create competing products aimed at the same enterprise HR budgets.

      Bailis's hiring makes more sense considering Anthropic’s aggressive efforts to establish enterprise distribution infrastructure recently. In early March, Anthropic launched a marketplace for enterprise software powered by Claude, allowing companies with a committed API budget to purchase third-party applications developed on Claude, while waiving the typical revenue share cloud providers charge. Notable launch partners included Snowflake, legal AI firm Harvey, and developer platform Replit.

      Shortly thereafter, Anthropic committed $100 million to a new Claude Partner Network with major firms like Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant, and Infosys, formalizing consulting partnerships aimed at facilitating Claude deployments in some of the largest enterprises. The company anticipates increasing this commitment over the years and is scaling its partner-facing workforce fivefold. Additionally, Anthropic has been in discussions for a joint venture with private equity firms, including Blackstone, aimed at embedding Claude across portfolio companies in exchange for approximately $200 million of its capital.

      Currently, enterprise customers constitute about 80% of Anthropic’s revenue, and the head of enterprise product has characterized its approach as a platform rather than merely a product, aiming to integrate into existing enterprise workflows rather than replace the software currently in use. This distinction is challenging to maintain: as Claude can generate things like offer letters and onboarding documents, it starts to substitute for the functionalities provided by traditional HR software platforms.

      The trend of executives leaving corporate titles for individual contributor roles at pioneering AI labs is becoming more common, although still considered rare. This shift reflects a desire for closeness to groundbreaking research over the authority associated with leading large organizations. The underlying motivation is often a belief that the most significant technical advancements are