Karan Sampath

Karan Sampath is an Applied AI engineer at Anthropic building the infrastructure that helps enterprises connect AI agents securely to internal systems. His work focuses on a practical obstacle to deploying capable agents: giving them useful access to company data without sacrificing security, visibility, or organizational control.

From document intelligence to enterprise agents

Sampath earned a bachelor’s degree in networked and social systems engineering and a master’s degree in data science at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also worked with Duncan Watts on research infrastructure, including the collaborative Surveyor platform. After a 2023 internship at Palantir working on Foundry developer infrastructure, he became a founding engineer at Aryn, an enterprise document-intelligence startup.

At Aryn, Sampath worked directly with customers and helped improve vision-model document processing, including upgrades to document recognition and processing speed. He developed a pragmatic framework for judging engineering investments by the expected half-life of code: software needed tomorrow, for several weeks, or for a year warrants different levels of polish and abstraction. His account of founding-engineer work connects that principle to product ownership, customer needs, mentorship, and direct feedback.

He joined Anthropic in 2025 and works on enterprise deployments and internal applications. His approach to agent infrastructure centers on several related ideas:

• Enterprise MCP gateways. Sampath advocates placing a shared gateway between agent clients and internal Model Context Protocol servers. This creates a root of trust for authentication, authorization, observability, credential management, and secure connectivity while freeing individual teams to concentrate on their tools’ business logic. His gateway architecture also incorporates internal registries, proxy routing, role-based permissions, and developer tooling.

• Centralized safeguards, decentralized experimentation. Shared security infrastructure allows a legal team, for example, to build and improve contract-review workflows without repeatedly reinventing access controls or undergoing separate security reviews for every change.

• Separating agent harnesses from enterprise data. A stable gateway boundary lets organizations adopt new clients, agent platforms, identity models, and credential systems without rebuilding each integration. It also preserves flexibility over whether particular agents operate internally or through external services.

• Agent decomposition with continuous evaluation. Sampath applies measurable architectural discipline to agent design, distinguishing tools, skills, and subagents and evaluating how each structural change affects an agent’s performance.

His independent project Director Diffusion extends his interests into generative imaging, combining dataset preparation, automated captioning, model fine-tuning, and evaluation to reproduce distinctive filmmaking styles.