What's up: Three questions for American Express's CIO; Trump exempts tech companies that invest in U.S.; United Airlines resumes flights after tech problem.

Good morning. Amid Silicon Valley's tech talent Thunderdome, AI startup Anthropic is keeping the drama low key compared to competitors and holding its own, offering lessons for anyone with stakes in the tech talent market.

New research from venture firm SignalFire shows that the AI startup is growing its engineering organization faster than competitors, hiring talent 2.68 times faster than they are losing them. 

Culture matters. Heather Doshay, a partner at SignalFire, tells the WSJ Leadership Institute's Isabelle Bousquette that Anthropic's mission and culture, focused on building AI with a greater emphasis on safety, has been a huge draw for job seekers. 

Salary is important, but when there's no huge magnitude of difference, mission and culture become bigger considerations, Michael Shamos, Distinguished Career Professor in the School of Computer Science and Director of the M.S. in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Carnegie Mellon University, tells the WSJLI.

Case in point, the WSJ today reports on the success Mustafa Suleyman, head of Microsoft AI, has had luring talent from Google DeepMind. He is offering bigger salaries, of course, but also assurances of a nimbler, more startup-like workplace.

Ultimately it comes down to the best technology. “I think it’s cyclic," said Shamos, referring to the Silicon Valley AI talent wars. "If Claude is the hottest LLM right now, then people want to work for Anthropic. When GPT-5 comes out, it’s going to be OpenAI again.”  Read the story.

For most business tech leaders, boast-worthy tech starts with modernized core systems. Below, American Express’s CIO discusses his approach. 

Why modernization is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: 'You kind of never finish.' A lot of tech leaders say their CEOs are writing big checks for AI initiatives. But what about everything else? How do you make sure that other core systems aren’t falling by the wayside while you push forward on emerging tech?

WSJLI: With so much else to focus on, how do you prioritize modernization?

Radhakrishnan: We spend 25% of our technology investment budget on this continuous modernization notion. Many firms spend money to modernize core platforms, then they stop and wait till the next trigger event happens. We think of this as something we do continuously. At any given time, there are modernizations of our core platforms we are finishing, we are in the middle of or we are about to start.

WSJLI: What kind of core platforms are we talking about?

Radhakrishnan: Our authorizations platform, our servicing technology platforms, our core accounts receivables, loyalty and benefit systems. As an example, our payments network: we completed this about a couple of years ago, and that was like a four or five year cycle.

These are interconnected platforms, so it's good to think about what's the right amount of them, right sequence and right combinations of those to do.

In some ways, it's like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. You kind of never finish. And every time you do it, you're building them with more modularity so that subsequent modernizations can be done even more efficiently and with speed.

WSJLI: Why is that important?

Radhakrishnan: It allows you to focus on not only what matters now, but rather on what will continue working long term. These are the building blocks for innovation.

It’s this mindset of being ready for the future so you don't accumulate the task of having to modernize a large part or almost all of the technology ecosystem only when things begin to go wrong.

United Airlines resumes flights after tech problem. The airline scrubbed more than 60 mainline flights late Wednesday, with more than 1,000 delays—after an issue with a key system that stores flight data and feeds it to other systems. 

The airline didn’t say what caused the outage, which began shortly after 6 p.m. E.T., but said it wasn’t related to cybersecurity concerns. Work has been under way to replace the aging system, according to people familiar with the matter.

Only the industry's latest tech-related issue. Alaska Airlines last month halted departures for a period because of the unexpected failure of a critical piece of hardware at a data center. In early 2023, a problem with an FAA pilot alert system led to the first nationwide ground stop since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Trump exempts tech companies that invest in U.S. President Trump on Wednesday said he would impose roughly 100% tariffs on all chips coming into the U.S. but exempt tech companies that have promised to manufacture domestically.

Here's $100 billion. His announcement came at an event trumpeting a new $100 billion investment pledge from Apple. The investment pledge added to a $500 billion four-year commitment Apple made in February that repackaged much of Apple’s existing spending plans in the U.S.

Apple said it was launching a new manufacturing program aimed at onshoring more of its supply chain. But its investment in American manufacturing still pales next to investments the company is making in its supply chains in China, India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.

Economic activity tied to manufacturing has shrunk for most of Trump’s second term. From March to July, U.S. manufacturing activity contracted, according to the Institute for Supply Management’s monthly survey. The Manufacturing PMI last registered at 48, below the 50 score that differentiates growth and decline. The effective average tariff rate on all imported goods now stands at roughly 18% versus 2.3% last year.

Historians are pumped. An AI tool called Aeneas and trained on more than 176,000 known Latin inscriptions created over 1,500 years in an area stretching from modern-day Portugal to Afghanistan, can predict the missing text of partially degraded Latin inscriptions, WSJ reports. 

Practically giving it away. After the General Services Administration this week approved OpenAI, Google and Anthropic as vendors in its tech marketplace, the ChatGPT maker said it would charge U.S. federal agencies just $1-a-year for its enterprise product, Bloomberg reports. 

The war against AI slop. Wikipedia in a new policy paper said its administrators now have the ability to quickly remove articles and edits generated by AI, PC World reports.

Meanwhile a federal judge in California spiked a state law blocking online platforms from hosting fake, election-related content in the run up to an election, Politico reports.

U.S. trading partners are lobbying the White House for exemptions to sweeping new tariffs that went into force on Thursday, as countries seek ways to muffle the impact on their economies of President Trump’s push to reorder global trade. (WSJ)

President Trump’s tariff war has inflicted almost $12 billion of losses on global automakers, the biggest hit they have faced since the pandemic. (WSJ)

The Kremlin confirmed that Russian leader Vladimir Putin was expected to meet with President Trump in the coming days, saying that the meeting was being planned for a location that would be named later. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.