What's up: another chip crisis; Oracle's latest financials; Chamber of Commerce sues Trump administration over H-1B visas.

Good morning. There’s a lot more to AI agents than the model, which plays the starring role and gets all of the attention. But agents are systems, in which the star needs the support of its team, much like a movie or play in which the leading characters need supporting characters to make the story work.

Last year, Anthropic introduced an important supporting character called Model Context Protocol, which connects the underlying AI model to applications, datasets and other tools such as email or calendar. MCP, and other efforts such as Google’s Agent2Agent protocol, have provided important infrastructure for making agents useful. For example, agents need that ability and the permission structure to connect to external entities.

Building on those efforts, Anthropic has introduced another piece of infrastructure called Agent Skills that helps its Claude models perform tasks. From yesterday’s blog post announcing the news:

Anthropic said Skills make Claude better at specialized tasks like working with Excel or following an organization's brand guidelines.

The company said that Claude apps have used Skills to create files like spreadsheets and presentations. Now users can now build their own.

We have often made the point that successfully deploying agents involves more than technology. It’s about process, workflow, and rethinking human roles as much as anything. But that doesn’t mean that all of the technological problems standing in the way of AI agents have been solved. The effort to build out the infrastructure surrounding the model at the heart of those systems is moving forward, though.

The auto industry is panicking about another chip shortage

With all eyes on GPUs, another chip story is playing out with potentially big ramifications for the auto industry.  The WSJ reports that Dutch semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia notified customers last week that it was stopping shipments of parts, people familiar with the matter say.

While a small player in the automotive-chip market overall, Nexperia happens to be the market leader for a basic category of chips mainly consisting of transistors and diodes, used in everything from lights to electronics to electronic control units used in vehicle systems.

Now automakers General Motors, Volkswagen, BMW, Mercedes-Benz and Stellantis are talking with suppliers and assessing potential impacts.

The crisis follows a decision last month by the Dutch government late last month to seize control of Nexperia from China’s Wingtech Technology, which is on a U.S. trade blacklist.

Here we go again. The auto industry is only a few years removed from a semiconductor crisis that dramatically affected production and left dealers with a shortage of new cars to sell.

Oracle significantly raised its long-term financial targets on Thursday during a meeting with analysts at its conference in Las Vegas. But unlike the first unveiling of those targets a year ago, and Oracle’s quarterly report last month that included even more blowout numbers, investors yawned. Oracle’s share price slipped over 2% in after-hours trading following Thursday’s meeting.

Oracle now expects annual revenue to hit $185 billion in the fiscal year ending in May 2029. That is more than triple the company’s current annual revenue and a 78% jump from the target the company provided last year for the same fiscal period.

Oracle also issued even more ambitious growth targets for per-share earnings over the next few years—likely an attempt to counter recent concerns about the profitability of serving AI workloads.

What Oracle didn’t say is how it expects to pay for the very expensive expansion of its network that will be needed to generate such returns. The company’s capital expenditures exceeded its operating cash flow for the first time since 1990 in its latest fiscal year that ended in May.

Meanwhile, its co-CEOs have defended the expansion. 

Chamber of Commerce enters the H-1B fight

The business lobby sued the Trump administration Thursday over hefty new fees in the H-1B visa program, recognized in the tech industry as a critical tool for securing in-demand high-skilled workers.

“The new $100,000 visa fee will make it cost-prohibitive for U.S. employers, especially start-ups and small and midsize businesses," said Neil Bradley, the chamber's executive vice president and chief policy officer.

The chamber’s lawsuit is seeking to block the new restrictions, saying that the presidential proclamation “is not only misguided policy; it is plainly unlawful.”

👉 Inside Trump’s Chaotic Overhaul of the H-1B Visa

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Ron Conway resigned from the board of Salesforce’s philanthropic arm over recent comments by Chief Executive Marc Benioff in support of deploying National Guard troops in San Francisco. "I now barely recognize the person I have so long admired,” Conway wrote in an email to Benioff, the New York Times reports.

Data-labeling for dollars

Uber drivers will soon have the option to take on a new gig: Data labeling. Bloomberg reports the rideshare company has been pitching its data services business, Uber AI Solutions, as it looks to cash on the demand for labeling services and bespoke datasets used to train AI models.

OG data labeller Scale AI has been valued at more than $29 billion after receiving more than $14 billion in investment from Meta Platforms this summer.

Can we scale this to everything?

Pinterest is giving its users new tools to restrict how much AI-generated content they see on the social-media platform, TechCrunch reports.  The move comes in reaction to community outcry over the levels of “AI Slop” on the site, widely used to get inspiration for events like home-decorating as well as finding products.

EssilorLuxottica credited its partnership with Meta Platforms for helping it reach record-breaking quarterly revenue that beat analysts’ expectations. The European eyewear company inked a deal with Meta in 2019 for Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company is  working on more Meta smart glasses for its Oakley and Prada brands, CNBC reports. 

Google is rolling out services that make it easier for users of Microsoft’s productivity applications to switch over as needed to Google Workspace. One service is designed to help make users make the switch during a Microsoft outage, quickly syncing email and files, Bloomberg reports.

Black hole theoretical physicist Alex Lupsasca of Vanderbilt University is the first person to join OpenAI’s new science team, as the ChatGPT-maker looks to boost its various scientific research initiatives, Axios reports.

The Justice Department on Thursday secured an indictment against John Bolton after an investigation into his handling of classified information, making President Trump’s former national security adviser the latest of his prominent critics to face prosecution. (WSJ)

The top U.S. admiral overseeing Caribbean deployments is leaving after just a year into his tenure as the Trump administration intensifies its campaign against alleged drug traffickers in Latin America. (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.