Anthropic hires Orange’s AI chief Steve Jarrett

Anthropic has hired Steve Jarrett, the Chief AI Officer of French telecom giant Orange, as the AI startup continues to expand its presence across Europe.Jarrett announced on LinkedIn that he will leave Orange after nearly seven years with the company and join Anthropic on August 25. Based in Paris, he will initially focus on helping the company tailor its AI products to the needs of customers across Europe and Africa.The move comes as Anthropic, the company behind the Claude family of AI models, accelerates its international growth plans. The startup recently opened a new office in Milan and has outlined plans to significantly expand its workforce outside the United States.At Orange, Jarrett held the roles of Chief AI Officer and Chief Data Officer, overseeing artificial intelligence, data engineering, cloud infrastructure, AI ethics, applied research and technology partnerships across the telecom operator's footprint spanning 26 countries.In his farewell note, Jarrett highlighted Orange's AI adoption efforts, saying the company's internal AI tools are now actively used by more than 90% of its 130,000 employees. He also said Orange generated more than €300 million in value from data and AI initiatives in 2025 and is targeting €600 million in annual value by 2028.During his tenure, Orange worked on several AI and data projects, including speech recognition models for African languages such as Wolof, Swahili, Bambara and Lingala, cloud and AI partnerships with companies including Google, OpenAI, Amazon Web Services and Anthropic.Jarrett brings more than three decades of technology industry experience to Anthropic. Before joining Orange in 2019, he held leadership roles at companies including Facebook (now Meta), Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple and Audible. His career has spanned mobile computing, internet infrastructure, data platforms and artificial intelligence.Also read: Anthropic accuses Alibaba of large-scale AI model extraction campaign