WSJ What’s News - Are Apprenticeships the Answer as AI Pulls Up the Career Ladder?

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

A.M. Edition for Aug. 28. A federal judge finds the Trump administration violated Anthropic’s first amendment rights by deeming it a supply-chain risk. Plus, prosecutors scale up their crackdown on insider trading on prediction markets. And as more young people opt out of even searching for entry-level roles, WSJ reporter Natasha Dangoor details the rising interest in apprenticeships on both sides of the Atlantic. Luke Vargas hosts.  Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

A judge finds the Trump administration violated Anthropics' 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. 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, really strong career for the rest of their life. 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.

citing 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. 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 $2 trillion. 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 and canceled, truncated or stalled contracts. The Trump administration has already been embracing some of Anthropics 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 Anthropics 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.

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 U.S. 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 journal's Alex Ossipovich saying that one of the cases

involves a U.S. service member suspected of winning more than a million dollars in profits through bets on military operations. On the whole, the Trump administration has been great for prediction markets. They've expanded into sports. They advertise everywhere and they've 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. So 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. Charges are expected to be filed as early as this fall. We should note that Polly Market has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal. The U.S. and Venezuela are in advanced talks that could see Washington take a direct stake

in more than a dozen of the country's oil fields. Energy reporter Adam Whitaker says the deal could involve fields housing almost a third of Venezuela's reserves and is aimed at bringing private investment off of the sidelines. The first place to start is that Venezuela, as all sector has fallen into widespread disarray after years of mismanagement. And ultimately, American oil companies have been very reluctant to spend the billions of dollars that the projects require. And as a result, we haven't seen the ramp up in production in the country that was initially envisaged. What the Trump administration is trying to do by taking these stakes is

signaling to the energy majors that you will have a reliable partner who can provide more stability and more security. The key thing is that so far, there are no details on what these deals could be or what the stakes could be. And the information that we understand is that talks could fall apart. So we'll be looking to see the nature of the deals and to understand which energy majors might be interested in partnering with the administration going forward. In a journal exclusive, we are reporting that Nvidia has hit pause

on some revenue-sharing deals with AI cloud companies after employees expressed concern about the arrangement drawing antitrust scrutiny. The deals which were announced in July would have given Nvidia two ways to profit by first selling its chips and then collecting revenue when customers rented them. The program was designed to solve financing problems facing smaller cloud providers, but we report that Nvidia rankled some potential partners by telling them that they could only rent chips to approved partners. In Nvidia spokeswoman said the broader business model announced in July is still in place

and is continuing to evolve. In a pair of earnings updates, AI demand is lifting the fortunes of semiconductor company Marvell, which saw revenues in its data center business jump by more than 45% year over year. However, that wasn't quite enough for investors triggering a more than 7% slide in shares off hours. And HR software provider Workday. Remember to input your performance goals, everyone,

is reporting higher profit in revenue as businesses adopt its AI agents. Co-founder Anil Busri admitted that a shift to charging customers based on the AI tokens that they use would mean a delayed financial gratification for workday, but he predicted it would soon prove worthwhile. Existing customers, they have an AI budget, and now we have products that actually fit in that AI budget,

which is a big win for us. But again, a lot of these new AI products are consumption-based, so we won't see the impact from the revenue until months or a year down the road. Markets are ending the week on a tepid note with investors in a holding pattern ahead of Kevin Warsh's highly anticipated speech in Jackson Hole. Fed watchers will be hoping for more clarity around the chairman's view on sticky inflation and falling jobs growth. His keynote is due at 10 a.m. Eastern. And jobs growth isn't just slowing in the U.S., but across the pond as well as the specter of youth unemployment

rises. But as our Natasha Dengor explains, apprenticeships could prove a solution. We'll look at that and more after the break. Youth unemployment is on the rise globally. And yesterday, new stats revealed that almost a million Brits between ages 16 to 24 are neither working nor in school. And increasingly, more people aren't even looking for employment, citing AI's impact on entry-level jobs. With education fees also skyrocketing, the journal's Natasha Dangor reports that a growing number of high school graduates are instead considering white-collar apprenticeship programs for industries such as consulting, finance, and law. And she spoke to our producer, Daniel Bach. Natasha, thanks for doing this. Normally, when we think of apprenticeships, that's related to blue-collar roles, right? How has that been changing?

Yeah, so here in the UK, we're seeing how more and more high school leavers are going for an apprenticeship in white-collar roles instead of blue-collar. So they're looking at consulting, law, finance, and we're talking about top firms. So Fresh Fields, PWC, firms that would have traditionally graduate roles reserved for top-performs. university graduates. Now it's school leavers who can apply for these roles and they get on the career ladder a lot quicker, a lot sooner. They don't have the same student debt and they're becoming really successful and earning well at a much younger age than had they gone to college. We're seeing that specifically in the UK, although the US government has invested about 150 million dollars over the past decade to expand apprenticeships and 100 million of that is put towards cybersecurity, AI and healthcare. But on the whole, a large part of the school lever apprenticeships offered

are in blue-collar roles. You know, there's a term here in the UK, Oxford, in Cambridge, which normally some of the companies you mentioned there, they might be looking for graduates from those schools. How are people finding their way into these companies without such a degree? Yeah, we're seeing people. We're seeing people. actually turn down offers at Oxford and Cambridge in order to pursue an apprenticeship. Because whilst, you know, having a prestigious degree is really great, it doesn't necessarily make it that much easier to find a job, especially if you're competing with AI for entry-level roles. So I spoke to Rumaza Khan, who said that she turned down an offer at Oxford University to do an apprenticeship in law.

She said she knew from a young age, she wanted to be a lawyer, and this would fast-track her into a career. Last year, she earned her law degree. She's on a much higher salary than she would be at this stage in her life had she graduated and trained as a lawyer. So we mentioned consulting, finance law off the top. What do these apprenticeships look like and what sort of entry-level jobs can people expect if they're out there looking for these? So apprentices are getting on-the-job training in these firms. So they're working directly with clients, they're managing projects. They're exposed to senior managers within the firm and even externally. So they are gaining skills, sort of non-academic skills that they wouldn't be gaining if they went to college first.

And they're gaining those skills at a much earlier stage in their career. So they're able to break through in the workforce much earlier. A lot of these companies are starting to realize that they can hire apprentices for less money and actually they're noticing that they can adapt quickly, fast learners and that actually having a more equal balance between graduate roles and apprenticeships is very fruitful for the company. And the other thing that might be driving people to apprenticeships as you report is the fear of mounting student debt. How is that changing people's perspective now? Absolutely, yeah. I mean, college is getting more and more expensive in the UK and overseas. And I think young people are starting to realize that it's unaffordable and that if they can get on the

career ladder sooner, then they might as well do that to avoid the high debt. That was journal reporter Natasha Dangor speaking to our Daniel Bach. And while AI is changing the jobs market for many, it's made those with jobs at the heart of the tech expansion, a hot commodity. These days in South Korea, these engineers that work at memory chip companies here have suddenly become very popular in the dating scene because they're expected to take home unusually high bonuses thanks to high profits from the AI boom.

That's journal Tech and Business reporter Giung Sown in Seoul, who says that bonuses are expected to average about $400,000 per employee this year at Samsung and roughly a half a million dollars at S.K. Heinex, making eligible engineers as sought after as doctors, lawyers, or accountants. It's gotten a lot harder for people to just easily go on dates with these engineers. So some of our interviewees were telling us that people working at Samsung and SK Hynix increasingly want to date only among themselves because it would mean double the high salaries that both people would be getting.

And that's it for what's news for this Friday morning. Today's show was produced by Hattie Moyer and Daniel Bach. Our supervising producer is Sandra Kilhoff, and I'm Lou Vargas for the Wall Street Journal. We will be back tonight with the new show. Otherwise, have a great weekend, and thanks for listening.