Are Apprenticeships the Answer as AI Pulls Up the Career Ladder?

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Luke Vargas (0:33)

A judge finds the Trump administration violated Anthropic's First Amendment rights by deeming it a supply chain risk. Plus, prosecutors crack down on insider trading on prediction markets.

And as more young people opt out of even searching for entry-level roles, we'll look at rising interest in apprenticeships.

Natasha Dangoor (0:52)

Young people are weighing up a really prestigious degree versus a direct entry into the job market, which will set them up in a really, really strong career for the rest of their life.

Luke Vargas (1:02)

It's Friday, August 28th. I'm Luke Vargas for The Wall Street Journal. And here is the AM Edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Anthropic has scored a major legal victory against the Trump administration. A federal court ruled that the government unlawfully retaliated against the AI startup when it blacklisted the firm as a supply chain risk after Anthropic publicly opposed the Pentagon's use of AI. Siding largely with the company's lawsuit, the court found that the administration acted in haste without evidence of a national security threat. Markets reporter Caitlin McCabe says the ruling comes at a critical time for Anthropic.

SPEAKER_1 (1:46)

We've reported that it's targeting a public debut in September or October, and any kind of company really wants to go into an IPO with as little bad attention, bad publicity, or regulatory scrutiny as possible, and that's especially true for a company like Anthropic, which is aiming for a massive valuation of about two trillion dollars. So as part of this case, Anthropic had said that the government's actions had contributed to the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars in canceled, truncated, or stalled contracts.

The Trump administration has already been embracing some of Anthropic's competitors like OpenAI, but at the same time, we do know that some government agencies outside of the Defense Department have been using some of Anthropic's more powerful models like Mythos and Fable, even as this case was going on. I think what remains to be seen now is whether the Pentagon and the Defense Department will now embrace Anthropic after this ruling.

Luke Vargas (2:48)

The Defense Department didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the latest twist in mail-in voting ahead of this year's midterms, a US district judge has temporarily stopped the Trump administration from enforcing postal service rules on how states design ballot envelopes and that require them to submit data about mail voters to a federal portal. That ruling comes just days before the first ballots are due to go out in parts of the country. Around two dozen Democratic-led states had challenged the new rules, with state and local officials saying it would be almost impossible to overhaul election preparations at this stage. The issue is expected to make its way to the Supreme Court soon. Nearly one in three Americans use mail-in ballots.

And we are exclusively reporting that regulators are expanding their crackdown on prediction markets. Their probe focuses on potential insider trading, with the governor-general's Alex Osipovich saying that one of the cases involves a US service member suspected of winning more than a million dollars in profits through bets on military operations.

Alex Osipovich (3:52)

On the whole, the Trump administration has been great for prediction markets. They have expanded into sports. They advertise everywhere and they have just been a big part of the zeitgeist, you could say. Regulators have generally been friendly to them. However, the regulators have also made it clear that there are certain kinds of wrongdoing that they will not tolerate and that includes insider trading, especially if it touches national security issues. You're unlikely to go and place a bet on some kind of a political type market if you think that you're going to lose to somebody who knows the inside track and you're going to just end up being a sucker against them.

For the platforms to have credibility, for the regulators to be able to say confidently that we have oversight of these platforms, they need to stop those types of incidents. Kalshi and PolyMarket, the two predominant prediction market platforms have both said that they cooperate with the government and have reported cases of insider trading to the authorities.