Workday’s CTO traded his C-suite title for a technical staff role at Anthropic

Peter Bailis, who joined Workday as CTO in May 2025, has left the company and taken a member of technical staff role at Anthropic, where he will focus on reinforcement learning engineering. The move trades C-suite authority for direct technical proximity to frontier AI development. Bailis brings deep enterprise software expertise — from Google Cloud AI products to Workday's agentic AI strategy — at a moment when Anthropic is actively building HR applications that compete with Workday's core business. The hire reflects a broader pattern of senior enterprise tech executives choosing individual contributor roles at AI labs, and signals Anthropic's accelerating push into enterprise product development, backed by a $100M partner network, a Claude marketplace, and enterprise customers now representing ~80% of its revenue.