ANTHROPIC hires ORANGE’s AI chief to accelerate its expansion in Europe

The artificial intelligence war is no longer being fought solely in research laboratories or data centres. It is now unfolding within the IT departments of major corporations. Anthropic has recruited Steve Jarrett, Orange’s Chief AI Officer since 2019, signalling that the next stage of its development will depend on winning over Europe’s largest companies.

The American executive will officially join the creator of Claude on 25 August. Based in Paris, his initial responsibility will be to adapt Anthropic’s products to European and African markets. The announcement comes just weeks after the company opened an office in Milan and as it prepares to triple its international workforce ahead of its IPO.

At Orange, Steve Jarrett did more than supervise artificial intelligence projects. He led an industrial transformation at scale. In a post published on LinkedIn, he noted that the group’s data and AI initiatives generated more than €300 million in value in 2025, with a target of €600 million in annual gains by 2028. More significantly, over 90% of the group’s 130,000 employees now use its internal artificial intelligence tools.

These figures reflect a profound change in how large companies assess AI. After initially measuring success by the number of use cases tested or pilot projects launched, boards now expect financial indicators, measurable productivity gains and documented returns on investment. Steve Jarrett is one of the few European executives able to demonstrate this kind of value creation at such a scale.

His career also illustrates the changing role of the Chief AI Officer. His responsibilities extended far beyond language models. He oversaw Orange’s data and AI strategy, technology partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Amazon, cloud migrations, digital sovereignty projects and training programmes.

His account of his seven years at Orange is revealing, both of his own career and of the telecom group’s strategy. Orange highlights the development of the first voice models capable of accurately recognising several African languages, including Wolof, Swahili, Bambara and Lingala, with the aim of improving access to digital services. Jarrett also points to Europe’s first sovereign agent solution built on LangChain, the development of a digital twin of the network with Amazon, a direct relationship with OpenAI, one of the largest migrations of telecom operator data to Google Cloud Platform, and a partnership with Coursera to provide several thousand Africans with free training for careers in data and artificial intelligence.

Taken individually, each project demonstrates a capacity for innovation. Together, they reveal something more valuable: expertise in industrialising AI. This accumulation of experience is probably what attracted Anthropic. The laboratory is not recruiting a language-model specialist, but an executive who knows how to deploy these technologies across an organisation of more than 100,000 employees operating under significant regulatory and operational constraints.

The scope of his future role reinforces this interpretation. Steve Jarrett will be responsible for adapting Anthropic’s products to European and African markets. At a time when artificial intelligence models must accommodate very different economic, cultural and linguistic realities, this knowledge of local markets is becoming a competitive advantage.

The appointment also illustrates the evolution of Anthropic’s international strategy. For years, major US laboratories developed their models in the United States and commercialised them through a handful of European offices. That approach is now reaching its limits. European companies expect more than simple access to the most capable models. They want guarantees concerning data governance, compliance with the EU AI Act, integration with their information systems and risk management. Adapting a product to these requirements demands an intimate understanding of the expectations of Europe’s largest corporate customers.

Keeping Steve Jarrett in Paris reflects this desire for proximity. The French capital is gradually becoming an anchor for American AI laboratories. It combines leading research centres, a dense startup ecosystem, major corporations engaged in digital transformation and a pool of executives who have already overseen industrial-scale AI deployments. Paris is no longer merely a source of engineering talent. It is becoming a decision-making centre for the European strategies of American companies.

The recruitment also reveals a more discreet shift in the talent war. For the past three years, competition has focused primarily on AI researchers, engineers specialising in foundation models and computing infrastructure experts. A new category of talent is now becoming strategic: executives capable of turning promising technologies into measurable economic value. Chief AI Officers, data-governance leaders and digital-transformation architects are becoming the new targets of the major laboratories.

For Anthropic, conquering Europe will no longer depend solely on the quality of Claude. It will also require an ability to understand the operational realities of European companies. That is the mission Steve Jarrett has agreed to undertake.