Welcome to the third edition of TriCom’s weekly newsletter! Every Friday, we’ll highlight the biggest and latest IT news. Here’s what happened this week.
In June, job postings in the tech industry went up 3%, which is consistent with the sustained expansion that has held steady for the year so far, according to DICE. Compared with June 2025, tech job postings have gone up by 27%. In terms of skills, AI fluency is now a requirement in 75% of tech job postings, compared with 73% in May.
Most tech job postings are concentrated in the consulting, software, aerospace/defense, and finance/banking industries. But the manufacturing industry had the largest month-over-month upswing, in which tech job postings increased 35%. Other industries with significant month-over-month gains include technology (19%), consulting (7%), and software (5%).
Many of the nation’s top tech companies are hiring academic stars from various universities. As reported this week by The Washington Post, corporations such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are sourcing some of their latest hires from academia, including three top economics professors at Stanford Unversity and the universities of Chicago and Virginia. Their research-oriented roles focus on AI’s effects on the job market.
These three economists will help their respective AI companies produce research aimed at policymakers and business executives. Some industry experts are concerned that these formerly independent scholars will be forced to keep their research private for corporate interests. Others are hopeful that the companies’ new hires will push for more broadly available data based on their findings.
On Tuesday, Apple launched a program called “Apple Upgrade,” a leasing program that allows customers to purchase iPhones, Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches for a subscription period. Apple Upgrade functions similarly to a car lease, in which consumers may pay off the device early or upgrade early to a new model, per The Verge.
Apple’s financial backer is Klarna, and the program is available through the company’s online stores and physical retail locations. Users can apply for the program with a soft credit check. If approved, they can participate in a 24-month subscription period for iPhones and Apple Watches and 36-month subscriptions for Macs and iPads. Lowest prices for each are $17.99 per month for the iPhone 17e, $11.99 for the Apple Watch series 11, $24.99 for the MacBook Air, and $11.99 for the iPad Air.
As reported by WIRED, some private chats between various users and Anthropic’s Claude chatbot were publicly available last weekend. The issue was initially flagged by a Reddit user, who discovered numerous chats by typing a Google dork request (“site:claude.ai/share”) into the search bar. Anthropic fixed it almost immediately, but the chats were still available for a while via Bing and Brave for a while.
Because Claude allows its users to share “snapshots” of chats by creating a URL to a specific thread, major search engines mistakenly indexed those URLs and presented them as results in its SERPs (search engine results page). To prevent the situation from occurring again, developers must block search engine’s web crawlers with a robots.txt file plus a “noindex” tag on individual pages.
In a press release on Monday shared by Staffing Industry Analysts (SIA), Kforce President and CEO Joseph Liberatore said that AI won’t stymie a need for hiring tech professionals. The Tampa firm is the third-largest IT staffing provider nationwide, according to second-quarter revenue that rose year-over-year by 4.5% to $349.3 million.
“There has been a lot of discussion about whether we and the broader sector can continue to deliver revenue growth given the much-speculated negative demand impact of AI tools and technologies,” Liberatore said. “We believe that the need for high-quality talent remains essential in virtually all technology initiatives, including AI-related investments.”
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