The artificial intelligence war is no longer being fought only in research laboratories or in data centers, but now within the IT departments of large groups. Anthropic has just recruited Steve Jarrett, Chief AI Officer of Orange since 2019, a signal that the next stage of its development involves conquering large European companies.
The American leader will officially join the creator of Claude on August 25. Based in Paris, he will initially be responsible for adapting Anthropic’s products to European and African markets. The announcement comes a few weeks after the opening of an office in Milan and as the company plans to triple its international workforce before its IPO.
At Orange, Steve Jarrett not only oversaw artificial intelligence projects, but led large-scale industrial transformation. In a message published on LinkedIn, he recalls that the group’s Data and AI initiatives have generated more than 300 million euros of value in 2025, with a target of 600 million euros in annual gains by 2028. Even more revealing, more than 90% of the group’s 130,000 employees now use internal artificial intelligence tools.
These figures reflect a profound evolution in the criteria for evaluating AI in large companies. After measuring the success of AI projects by the number of use cases tested or pilots launched, boards of directors ask for financial indicators, measurable productivity gains and documented returns on investment. Steve Jarrett is one of the rare European leaders capable of demonstrating this value creation on a very large scale.
His journey also illustrates the transformation of the role of Chief AI Officer. His scope went well beyond just language models, he managed the Data & AI strategy, technological partnerships with OpenAI, Google and Amazon, migrations to the cloud, digital sovereignty projects as well as training programs.
The assessment he draws up of his seven years at Orange is revealing both of his career and of the strategy of the Telecom group. Orange thus claims the development of the first voice models capable of accurately recognizing several African languages, notably Wolof, Swahili, Bambara or Lingala, in order to improve access to digital services. It also highlights the first European sovereign agent solution based on LangChain, the construction of a digital twin of the network with Amazon, a direct relationship with OpenAI, one of the largest data migrations from a telecom operator to Google Cloud Platform as well as a partnership with Coursera to train several thousand Africans for free in data and artificial intelligence professions.
Taken separately, each of these projects demonstrates a capacity for innovation. Together, they above all demonstrate expertise in the industrialization of AI, and it is probably this accumulation of experience that attracted Anthropic. The laboratory is not recruiting a specialist in language models but a manager who knows how to deploy these technologies in an organization of more than one hundred thousand employees, under strong regulatory and operational constraints.
The scope of its future mission confirms this reading. Steve Jarrett will be responsible for adapting Anthropic’s products to European and African markets. In a context where artificial intelligence models must now adapt to very different economic, cultural and linguistic realities, this knowledge of the field becomes a competitive advantage.
This appointment also illustrates the evolution of Anthropic’s international strategy. For a long time, large American laboratories developed their models in the United States before marketing them from a few European offices. This logic is today reaching its limits, European companies expect more than simple access to the most efficient models, and are demanding guarantees on data governance, compliance with the European regulation on artificial intelligence, integration with their information systems and risk management. Adapting a product to these requirements requires intimate knowledge of the expectations of major European accounts.
Steve Jarrett’s continued presence in Paris reflects this desire for proximity. The French capital is gradually establishing itself as an anchor point for American laboratories. It brings together leading research centers, a dense ecosystem of startups, large groups engaged in their digital transformation and a pool of leaders who have already led industrial deployments of AI. Paris is no longer just a reservoir of engineers and is becoming a decision-making center for the European strategies of American players.
This recruitment finally reveals a more discreet evolution of the war for talent. For three years, the competition has mainly focused on researchers in artificial intelligence, engineers specializing in fundamental models or experts in computing infrastructures. A new category of profiles is now becoming strategic: leaders capable of transforming promising technologies into measurable economic value. Chief AI Officers, data governance managers and digital transformation architects are becoming the new targets of large laboratories.
For Anthropic, the conquest of Europe no longer depends only on the quality of Claude, but also on his ability to understand the operational realities of European companies, a mission accepted by Steve Jarrett.
