The bidding war for top AI talent masks a deepening crisis in the broader market for tech skills, Axios managing editor for tech Scott Rosenberg writes.

• Why it matters: Big Tech's bottomless checkbook is open for a select few because AI's leaders see themselves in a race to superintelligence.

Whoever wins will dominate the world, they believe. So when it comes to hiring winning players, they just keep adding more zeros for the tiny handful of researchers who've built the massive models at AI's frontier edge.

• Anywhere below this stratosphere, however, the tech job market looks very different.
• Software veterans are wondering how long their experience will be valuable in an AI-dominated industry. Recent graduates fear entry-level jobs are disappearing.

🔬 Zoom in: Mark Zuckerberg's epic efforts to lure talent from AI startups and rivals like Apple have involved eye-popping compensation packages.

• The Meta CEO offered one prospect, Andrew Tulloch, a billion-dollar package "worth as much as $1.5 billion over at least six years," The Wall Street Journal reported.
• Tulloch's offer was part of a larger raid to hire key players from Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab, which is full of exiles from OpenAI. None has taken the bait.
• Zuckerberg has had more success poaching leading researchers directly from OpenAI and from Apple's foundation models team, which has faltered in efforts to catch up with rivals.

🖼️ The big picture: Many top researchers are driven less by dollars than by a sense of mission and a yearning to be the first to solve a hard problem.

• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alluded to this dynamic in an internal memo, vowing that "missionaries will beat mercenaries."

The best researchers are also attracted by the opportunity to pursue their interests and hunches without distraction from an employer's more humdrum needs around products and profits.

• OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever launched his Safe Superintelligence startup last year with a promise that researchers would be "insulated from short-term commercial pressures."
• Sutskever reportedly turned down a Zuckerberg offer.

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Top Democrats are speaking — and acting — in increasingly existential terms over the audacious Trump-backed push to redraw Texas' congressional map ahead of the 2026 midterms, Axios' Zachary Basu writes.

• Why it matters: The proposed Texas map is designed to net the GOP up to five House seats — potentially enough to decide the majority for President Trump's Republicans in his final two years in office.

For many Democrats, this moment is an inflection point in the party's Trump-era identity crisis — one that could determine whether "fighters" or "folders" carry the torch into 2028.

• "This is a war. We are at war. And that's why the gloves are off, and I say bring it on," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul declared yesterday.

🔎 Zoom in: More than 50 Democratic lawmakers fled Texas on Sunday to prevent the GOP-controlled legislature from voting on the new map.

• Texas Gov. Greg Abbott threatened them with daily $500 fines, felony bribery charges if the fines are paid for by donations, and the possibility of removal from office. The Texas state House issued civil arrest warrants.

State of play: Outside Texas, key Democratic governors have launched an aggressive counteroffensive to try to neutralize the GOP's redistricting push.

• In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom is eyeing a November special election that would sideline the state's independent redistricting commission and ask voters to approve a new, legislature-drawn map favoring Democrats.
• In New York, Hochul said Democrats have "no choice" but to pursue a constitutional amendment to authorize new maps — though it wouldn't appear on the ballot until 2027 at the earliest.
• In Illinois, where the congressional map is already heavily gerrymandered, Gov. JB Pritzker has vowed to protect fleeing Texas Democrats and left the door open to further revisions of the state's map.

👓 Between the lines: Newsom's push for a referendum in just three months will be a legal and political high-wire act that — if successful — could become the defining achievement of his career.

• "If this works and Dems win the House in 2026 by <5 seats, 'I saved us from a second MAGA Republican trifecta' is a hell of a platform for Newsom to run [for president] on in 2028," tweeted Democratic pollster Adam Carlson.

Share this story ... Go deeper: California could slash 5 GOP U.S. House seats to counter Texas' move to pad Republican margin.

The U.S. Army is consolidating 75 contracts into a single arrangement with Palantir Technologies worth as much as $10 billion — a move the service said will accelerate deliveries and eliminate middleman fees, Axios Future of Defense author Colin Demarest writes.

Why it matters: The 10-year deal — one of Palantir's largest Pentagon contracts — is evidence of three things, closely related:

1. The ascendency of Palantir in Washington and at the Pentagon, in particular. (At an AI summit last month, President Trump remarked, "We buy a lot of things from Palantir.")
2. The changing ways militaries are trying and buying products, especially software.
3. The maturing D.C.-Silicon Valley relationship, which was on the rocks not too long ago.

🔭 Zoom out: Palantir is leaning hard into defense work. CEO Alex Karp has made it no secret that he wants the West to dominate.

• Last year, the company won a $178 million Army contract to deliver state-of-the-art trucks that promise to streamline the battlefield process of spotting, tracking and firing at targets.

Keep reading ... Go deeper: "In Trump's Washington, Palantir is winning big" (WashPost gift link).

Pope Leo XIV — the first American pontiff — has the most positive image in the U.S. by far among 14 national and global figures included in Gallup's annual polling on top newsmakers.

• The only others viewed positively: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Between the lines: Favorability ratings have dropped for Trump administration figures since January, Gallup notes.

• That includes President Trump himself, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elon Musk.

The most popular Trump figure: Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

• Go deeper.

Arrests by U.S. immigration agents dropped by nearly 20% in July, Axios' Russell Contreras writes.

• Why it matters: The decline followed protests over the waves of raids by masked immigration agents in June — particularly in Southern California — that led to court orders that have hindered some ICE operations, at least for now.

🧮 By the numbers: ICE agents booked an average of 990 arrests per day from July 1 to July 27, according to data collected by the nonpartisan Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

• That was down from an average of 1,224 daily arrests in June — and well short of Stephen Miller's stated goal of at least 3,000 immigration arrests per day, which the Trump administration appears to have backed off from.

Keep reading.

AI note-taking software is so nosy (and acute) that it catches asides in meetings you didn't want the whole room to hear, The Wall Street Journal warns:

"Before attendees file in, or when one colleague asks another to hang back to discuss a separate matter, AI notetakers may pick up on the small talk and private discussions meant for a select audience, then blast direct quotes to everyone in the meeting."

Keep reading (gift link).

🔮 Coming attractions: Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang will keynote a splashy AI conference in Washington on Oct. 28, with 70+ sessions ranging from robotics and remote sensing to agentic AI and reasoning AI.

• The event is called GTC DC, after Nvidia's annual GTC (short for GPU Technology Conference) in San Jose, which has been called AI Woodstock and the Super Bowl of AI. The D.C. conference will be at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center from Oct. 27-29.

More on GTC DC.

David Plouffe, an architect of former President Obama's 2008 campaign, is joining public relations firm Orchestra as a partner.

• Orchestra CEO Jonathan Rosen highlighted Plouffe's "campaign brilliance, public policy savvy, and private sector agility."

"As AI continues to revolutionize communications, David will give C-suite leaders the senior-level strategy they need in a rapidly changing world," Rosen added.

• Orchestra — formerly known as BerlinRosen Holdings — also recently brought on former SKDK CEO Josh Isay, who will co-lead the firm's advisory practice with Plouffe.

Zoom out: Plouffe previously served as an executive at Uber and helped launch the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.

• Plouffe chairs fwd.us, an immigration advocacy group, and The Just Trust. He serves on the boards of the Obama Foundation and Oscar Health.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang leads the Fortune 100 Most Powerful People in Business list, which you're seeing here first. The top 10:

1. Jensen Huang, Nvidia
2. Satya Nadella, Microsoft
3. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta
4. Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, and others
5. Wang Chuanfu, BYD
6. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet (Google)
7. Ren Zhengfei, Huawei Technologies
8. Sam Altman, OpenAI
9. Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase
10. Mary Barra, GM

• Full list ($).