A newly released batch of messages shows top U.S. officials sharing detailed plans about a military operation against the Houthis in Yemen. The group chat also offers insight into the reasons behind the strike, resentment U.S. leaders feel toward Europe, and President Trump’s directives to “levy” costs for the attack against them.
On March 15, a top commander for the Yemen-based Houthi rebel group was confirmed dead by U.S. military forces.
National security advisor Mike Waltz then shared that information with a Signal group chat that included top members of the U.S. cabinet, the Vice President, senior White House officials, the CIA director, and, likely unbeknownst to everyone, a journalist: the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, who would later publish the exchange, making headlines around the globe.
“The first target—their top missile guy—we had a positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz texted the group chat.
“Excellent,” Vice President JD Vance wrote back.
Waltz replied with a combination of emojis: fist, American flag, flame.
The released text messages came after a report published Tuesday detailed how The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently added to the group chat in which top government officials discussed plans for a series of military strikes against the Houthis. A day later, The Atlanticpublished more messages from the group chat after the White House and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth downplayed the exchange. Both parties said the messages, sent over the Signal app, were not classified and did not feature details about the attacks against the Houthis that took place earlier this month.
When reached for comment, White Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt referred Fortune to an X post she published Wednesday morning, denying the group chat included “war plans.” The Department of Defense did not respond to a request for comment.
The newly released text messages detail officials’ reasons for attacking the Houthis—to stop their attacks on shipping lanes in the Middle East—and frustrations that doing so would benefit Europe more than the U.S. They also include a timeline of the attacks that took place on March 15 sent by Hegseth.
Hegseth sent a three hour and 21-minute plan that would run from 12:15 p.m. to 3:36 p.m. ET.
1215et: F-18s LAUNCH (1st strike package)
1345: ‘Trigger Based’ F-18 1st Strike Window Starts (Target Terrorist is @ his Known Location so SHOULD BE ON TIME – also, Strike Drones Launch (MQ-9s)
1410: More F-18s LAUNCH (2nd strike package)
1415: Strike Drones on Target (THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP, pending earlier ‘Trigger Based’ targets)
After successful confirmation of the strikes, Hegseth congratulated the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), which is the military’s combatant command that handles operations in the Middle East.
“CENTCOM was/is on point,” Hegseth wrote after the attacks. “Great job all. More strikes ongoing for hours tonight, and will provide full initial report tomorrow. But on time, on target and good readouts so far.”
The plans Hegseth shared match those of strikes the White House confirmed a day later on March 16. President Donald Trump confirmed the attacks against the Houthis in a social-media post that day, writing that doing so was critical to ensuring the stability of global shipping and trade.
That same rationale was shared in the group chat among many of the principal decision makers. However, the text messages also reveal the resentment certain officials felt at having to engage in military action abroad. Vance, Hegseth, and Waltz all expressed the view that Europe was relying on the U.S. to attack the Houthis because its militaries weren’t able to.
“European navies do not have the capability to defend against the types of sophisticated, antiship, cruise missiles, and drones the Houthis are now using,” Waltz texted the group before a final decision on the strikes was made. “So whether it’s now or several weeks from now, it will have to be the United States that reopens these shipping lanes.”
Waltz added the U.S. was the “only” one with the military capability to take out the Houthi armaments, to which Vance replied that he was on board with strikes if Hegseth was, albeit with some reservations. “I just hate bailing Europe out again,” Vance wrote.
Hegseth agreed with Vance’s sentiment, while acknowledging Waltz’s point that the task ultimately fell to the U.S. “VP: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading,” Hegseth wrote. “It’s PATHETIC. But Mike is correct, we are the only ones on the planet (on our side of the ledger) who can do this.”
The conversation then turned to how the group would approach receiving some form of compensation from Europe for the strikes. Officials saw Europe as owing the U.S. something in exchange for stopping the Houthis bombing of ships in the Red Sea, because they transported more goods to Europe than to the U.S.
Since Trump reentered the White House in January, tensions have increased between the U.S. and its European allies over trade, defense spending, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Many within the Trump administration believe the U.S. does more for Europe than Europe does for the U.S. It is now shifting U.S. foreign policy toward Europe to be more confrontational and transactional, a position White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller espoused in the leaked chat.
“If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return,” Miller wrote.
Other messages seemed to indicate that line of thinking came directly from Trump. “Per the president’s request we are working with DoD and State to determine how to compile the costs associated and levy them on the Europeans,” Waltz wrote.
Hello and welcome to Eye on AI. In this edition: LinkedIn chief product officer Tomer Cohen talks about the future of work and how the Microsoft-owned professional sbocial network is using AI to make the lives of recruiters and job seekers, hopefully, better…OpenAI closes the largest venture capital funding round ever…Big Pharma learns to share data…and London startup Synthesia grants actors equity in exchange for their likeness. Is it a model for solving AI’s IP conundrum?
If you want to know how AI is changing the nature of work, LinkedIn offers a good vantage point. The Microsoft-owned professional social network is a key hub for job seekers and recruiters—every minute, 10,000 people apply for a job through the platform and seven people are successfully hired on it, according to the company. That means it has lots of data on what roles companies are hiring for and the skills they are looking for. LinkedIn is also a good lens through which to examine how AI is altering the nature of looking for work.
The person ultimately responsible for rolling out AI product features at LinkedIn is Tomer Cohen, the company’s chief product officer. I recently sat down with Cohen at LinkedIn’s London office to chat about AI’s impact on job seekers, recruiters, and on LinkedIn’s own platform.
70% of skills in most jobs will change by 2030
Cohen started out by telling me that the company’s research suggests that 70% of skills used in most jobs will change by 2030, with AI being a big driver of those changes. That’s only four years from now. And there are already signs of big shifts happening. LinkedIn also publishes an annual report called “Jobs on the Rise” about which roles are seeing the most growth in job listings in specific geographies. This year, 70% of the roles seeing the fastest growth were new to the list. And what was the most in-demand role on the list? Well, perhaps not surprisingly, it was “artificial intelligence engineer.”
With roles potentially morphing so quickly, Cohen says, wise employers are starting to think less about the specific roles they need to fill—and in fact, are deconstructing some traditional roles—and more about what skills they need their employees to have both today and in the future. So this year, LinkedIn produced a new report called “Skills on the Rise.” Again, not surprisingly, it turns out “AI literacy” ranks as one of the most sought-after skills. But so too do broad, human-oriented skills such as “innovative thinking,” “problem solving,” “strategic thinking,” “public speaking,” “conflict mitigation,” and “relationship building.”
For Cohen, the most striking stat from LinkedIn’s research is that people entering the workforce now will likely have twice as many roles in their career as someone who entered the workforce 15 years ago. “If there was ever a time to build a growth mindset and emphasis on adaptability and agility and the ability to learn and shift between roles, it’s now right,” he says. Formal college and university education is going to matter much less than it did before—at least in terms of what degree people actually get. Instead, smart employers, he says, are going to be looking for life-long learners who can quickly acquire new skills and adapt to new responsibilities.
Learning to let employees learn to learn
Cohen used the example of how AI was rapidly allowing the creation of a new role that he calls “the full stack builder”—by which he means someone who can, with the help of AI, perform functions that were previously siloed into different roles and functions, including research and development, design, engineering, and product.
He says the most successful companies during this AI transition will be those that give their employees the time to learn skills and experiment with building things with AI. He also notes that there is a tension because time spent learning is often time away from actually doing the day-to-day work and because not all experiments in trying to build things with AI will be successful. But he says companies need to find this balance. If anything, he says, they should tip the scale in favor of helping employees learn AI skills.
“If you are over-indexing on performing [as opposed to learning], you will be behind,” he says. “Giving people space to learn is critical. You have to transform your own workforce. If in one year’s time, you are disappointed that your workforce is not ‘AI native,’ it is your fault [for not giving them time to learn AI skills.]”
Recruitment becomes an AI vs. AI game
I asked Cohen about complaints that AI was having a detrimental effect on the recruitment process. I’ve heard companies say candidates are using generative AI to apply for many more jobs than in the past, so that they were being inundated with applications. What’s more, more people were using generative AI to burnish their CVs and cover letters, making applicants appear more homogenous and making the screening process more difficult—forcing employers in many cases to turn to AI to do the initial screening of applicants.
Job seekers, on the other hand, complain that the way recruiters are using AI may not give candidates a fair shake—especially if those AI tools are not set up to take into account the shifting emphasis towards softer, harder-to-assess skills that Cohen talked about. The use of AI tools for initial screening interviews, something many companies now use, can feel dehumanizing for job seekers—and might unfairly disadvantage candidates who would be good hires but are flustered by doing the video interview with an AI bot. (Worse, in some cases the AI screening tools may harbor hidden biases that even the companies using them may not be aware of.)
Cohen acknowledged that these were problems. But he said LinkedIn’s AI tools were hopefully designed to help counteract some of these trends. For instance, he says it is a tough job market right now in most of the developed world. As a result, many job seekers are feeling a bit desperate and generative AI has in some ways made it easier for people to apply for jobs that might not be the best fit for them. LinkedIn now has AI-powered tools that help a candidate decide how good a match their skills are for a role, providing them with a percentage for how closely they match what the employer is seeking. Cohen says that more than a third of job seekers on LinkedIn use this tool. LinkedIn has also revamped its search process using generative AI, so job seekers no longer need to use keywords that might match what is in the job description and instead can simply describe in plain English what sorts of jobs they are looking for.
The company has also debuted an AI-powered coaching tool that people can use to practice work conversations and receive AI-generated feedback from a coaching model specifically trained to give the sort of feedback that an executive coach might provide. The tool, which works with both voice and text, is mostly designed for the kinds of interactions that an employee and a manager might have—giving challenging feedback, or conducting a performance review, or discussing work-life balance with a manager. But it could also be used to practice for a job interview. The tool is available in English to LinkedIn Premium subscribers.
When it comes to recruitment, LinkedIn has used generative AI to power outreach to candidates. These AI-crafted messages result in a 40% higher response rate and the candidates also respond 10% faster than without AI-assistance, Cohen says. And just this month the company launched its first “AI agent”—called “Hiring Assistant”—that is designed to do many of the tasks that a junior recruiter might. “Everything from sourcing all the way to reaching out to candidates will be automated for [recruiters], so they can focus on those phone calls and interactions and meetings with the candidates,” he said.
The agent has been piloted by some big companies, including SAP, Siemens, and Verizon. Digital infrastructure company Equinix, which was one of the initial users, reported that using the AI agent allowed each of its human recruiters to increase the number of open roles they can handle at a given time from an average of five to an average of 15.
That’s the kind of productivity boost that makes business executives grin. But I’m not convinced companies are taking on board Cohen’s message about life-long learning and finding ways to transform their existing workforces for a future where work is organized around a dynamic set of skills, not roles. Too many companies, particularly in a job market that favors employers, find it easier to fire workers and then hire new ones with experience that seems to exactly match a job description—rather than figure out how to reskill their existing workforce. What’s more, existing recruitment processes are generally poor at assessing people for the kinds of soft skills—adaptability, learning efficiency, flexibility, and resilience—Cohen says will matter most in this brave new world. There’s an opportunity there for companies that can develop and deploy such assessments first.
With that, here’s the rest of this week’s AI news.
Before we get to the news, if you’re interested in learning more about how AI will impact your business, the economy, and our societies (and given that you’re reading this newsletter, you probably are), please consider joining me at the Fortune Brainstorm AI London 2025 conference. The conference is being held May 6-7 at the Rosewood Hotel in London. Confirmed speakers include Mastercard chief product officer Jorn Lambert, eBay chief AI officer Nitzan Mekel, Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, noted tech analyst Benedict Evans, and many more. I’ll be there, of course. I hope to see you there too. You can apply to attend here.
And if I miss you in London, why not consider joining me in Singapore on July 22 and 23 for Fortune Brainstorm AI Singapore. You can learn more about that event here.
Pop star Chappell Roan is no stranger to controversy: She’s gotten pushback for complaining about “abuse and harassment” by strangers in public, canceling a performance at the last minute to prioritize her health, and refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in the last election.
And now, with comments she made last week as a guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Roan has really stepped into a hornet’s nest: She’s angered moms.
When asked by host Alex Cooper if she’s still close with friends back home in Missouri, she said that she is, but that their lives are very different, with many of them parents to little children.
“All of my friends who have kids are in hell,” the 27-year-old said. “I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age. I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”
As the oldest of four kids herself, Roan added that her mom had her at 23, asking, “Why did my parents do that?”
The interview quickly moved on—to high school reminiscing, early idols, fame. But many moms have remained stuck on the parenting comments, taking to social media to call Roan out.
“What she said was deeply misogynistic,” noted one critic on Instagram. “Pushing the narrative against mothers. It’s so miserable, it’s so awful blah blah blah.”
Parenting, said another on Instagram, is “hard af don’t get me wrong but to openly sh*t on your friends? After they vented to her in confidence and probably already feel like crap. She’s not doing them any favors, I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who needs to air out other people’s dirty laundry for the sake of fame. “
Some agreed with that criticism over on X, with one noting that the comments are “a prime example of why you cannot just vent to anyone because I guarantee she has this perspective because a few of her mom friends are going through it,” adding, “May the friendships of narcissistic childless women with no sense of loyalty [never] find me lol.”
Another person on X admitted that, though she loves the pop star, her comment “reinforces the stigma that if you complain about motherhood you must hate your life and your kids. :/ motherhood is hard, not miserable and we don’t hate our kids.”
On the Mom Wars Substack, author Kara Kennedy went so far as to suggest Roan is mom-bashing to further her career, as “hating kids right now is in vogue.”
Still others defended Roan, criticizing those who took offense.
“If you’re a mom and she offended you by sharing her personal opinion from her life (not yours), ask yourself why,” noted an Instagram commenter. “You’re projecting your unhappiness on her. You heard what you wanted to hear, not what she said.”
Added another, “Kids aren’t for everyone. I respect her answer and found it to be honest; not negative.”
Why were Chappel Roan’s comments so triggering?
Laura Markham, a Brooklyn-based clinical psychologist, mother, and parenting coach, understands why the pop star’s comments were a “profound emotional trigger.”
“Parents are doing one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, with very little societal support,” she tells Fortune. “They are often exhausted and sleep-deprived. They feel constant pressure to be ‘perfect’ from social media. Deep down, they desperately need affirmation that their sacrifice matters.”
Moms feeling defensive about what Roan said, Markham explains, is “not insecurity so much as a fear that if they acknowledge the profound challenges too openly, the difficult feelings might overwhelm them.” Our culture, she points out, “offers parents almost no structural support while simultaneously romanticizing parenthood. This creates a perfect storm where parents must convince themselves and others that the struggles are ‘worth it’ because the alternative—admitting how much they need help—feels too vulnerable in a society that judges parental struggle as personal failure.”
TikToker and mom Stella Joy, in a video now seen over 1.2 million times, touched on some similar ideas, and says she believes people got so defensive because “they don’t like having a mirror held up to the fact that they fell for the greatest lie ever told,” which is, from the moment they hold their first baby doll as a kid, that “being a mother is our ultimate goal.”
Markham, meawhile, points to evidence that confirms what Roan observed about unhappiness and parenting: One study, for example, found a decline in well-being once parenting begins. Another found that couples without children were happier in their relationships.
But the big response to Roan’s comments is also evidence of an American political clash, Markham says.
“There is also a significant political backlash right now that glorifies motherhood as women’s ultimate fulfillment, precisely as reproductive rights are being curtailed nationwide,” she says. “For this ideology to succeed, motherhood must be portrayed as universally blissful despite mounting evidence of parental struggle in a society without adequate support systems … When young women like Roan speak openly about the struggles their parent-friends face, it directly challenges a narrative that aims to channel women back toward traditional roles without acknowledging the profound difficulties involved.”
Instead of responding with compassion and acknowledging these systemic issues, she says, “we’re shaming women who speak truthfully about their experiences,” which only further deepens parents’ isolation and “manipulates parents’ genuine love for their children into a weapon against honest conversation.”
Some are really trying to be honest, though—especially on TikTok, where many of the responses to Roan addressed these complexities.
“I struggle with happiness on a daily basis,” said Mallory Brooks, a 26-year-old single mom who defended Roan’s honesty in a video (above) viewed over 900,000 times. “I love my child more than anything in the world,” she said. But on top of the day-to-day difficulties, she added, “a lot of moms are promised happiness as the result of motherhood.” Now she realizes, “I was promised a village that I don’t have.”
Entertainment8 years ago