A man accused of corporate espionage in a scandal rocking the world of HR has confessed to gathering intelligence on one company and passing along information to its rival, according to a new court filing.
Keith O’Brien, who is accused of acting as a spy for HR software firm Deel, submitted an affidavit to an Irish court this week in which he says he was paid by Deel to disclose confidential information about its competitor Rippling, another HR software company. He says co-founder and CEO of Deel Alex Bouaziz directly suggested he keep his job at Rippling and work as an inside man.
“I recall him specifically mentioning James Bond,” O’Brien wrote. “I asked him what he meant. He said he would offer me a monetary award if I agreed to spy on Rippling for Deel.”
Deel did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Rippling did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Rippling CEO Parker Conrad posted parts of the affidavit on X Tuesday, writing that Bouaziz “personally orchestrated his company’s alleged spy scheme, the spy said in a full confession
O’Brien writes that he was asked to provide Bouaziz with information regarding Rippling’s “ways of doing things” which he inferred to mean corporate strategy, customer insights and other confidential company information. O’Brien says he communicated with Bouaziz multiple times per day, and even on weekends. In November, he says he was awarded $6,000 for the insights he passed along, and continued to receive payments monthly in exchange for valuable information, according to the court filing.
At one point, when Rippling began to suspect that something was wrong, O’Brien claims he was asked by Deel’s legal team to purchase a burner phone from Deel’s lawyers, destroy his old one with an axe, and shove it down his mother-in-law’s drain, according to the court affidavit. He further alleges that he was advised by lawyers for Deel that he should leave Ireland and fly with his family to Dubai, and that Deel would pay for his accommodations.
O’Brien says that in March, he agreed to meet with Rippling’s legal team for an interview, and wrote that he was fearful of his safety “given the power and wealth of the individuals involved.”
“I was getting sick of concealing this lie,” he wrote in the affidavit. “I realized that I was harming myself and my family to protect Deel.”
It’s no secret that companies are rushing to incorporate AI into the hiring process. KPMG, for instance, uses a recruiting chatbot to help cut back the time it takes to schedule interviews, and UPS’s almost fully-automated process helps the company hire front-line workers in under 10 minutes.
But one top recruiter for Fortune 500 companies advises holding off on replacing all aspects of the process with AI. In fact, he says it could make it more tedious for HR professionals down the line. And he says that most large public companies he works with are increasingly finding that using technology to replace parts of the hiring process isn’t working as well as intended.
“With AI, recruiters are using keywords to target thousands of people on LinkedIn at once, all while applicants are using AI to tailor their resumes to exactly what hiring managers are looking for,” says John Vlastelica, founder and CEO of Recruiting Toolbox, a hiring and training consultancy. “It’s hard to find the best candidate when they all have resumes that are perfectly written and perfectly tailored for the role.”
That’s why many of the companies he works with are looking to take a more human approach to their hiring strategy, and going back to basics. That means having more live conversations, relying less on video, and doing final interviews in-person. It also means widening the search scope to candidates who may not seem perfect for the role at first glance.
“Recruiters want the real image of the person they’re hiring, not an AI-created version of the candidates,” says Vlastelica. He even suggests that recruiters actually look for candidates who have some slight flaws on their resumes, tiny typos or headshots that don’t look overly Photoshopped. “If it’s too perfect, it probably isn’t real,” he says.
Leaning into the more human elements of hiring is even more crucial given that some candidates are using false identities to apply to jobs, and deepfake AI to mask themselves during interviews. One survey published last month from career platform Resume Genius found that 17% of hiring managers have encountered job candidates using deepfake technology during interviews. Some of this cohort has even been revealed to be North Korean IT workers connected to organized crime groups.
That doesn’t mean organizations should give up on using AI to recruit. In fact, Vlastelica recommends all companies adopt the technology in some way to keep up with the times. But in this new world of phony profiles and artificially enhanced CVs, he says, companies need to ensure that some traditional aspects of the hiring process don’t get thrown out for the sake of efficiency. And he adds that’s when mistakes, like hiring people under faulty identities, are more likely to happen.
“It’s not just about finding the best candidates anymore. It’s about finding the real ones.”
The U.S. dollar is down nearly 9%, year to date. Yields on Treasuries have stayed high even though the stock market has gone down — the opposite of what investors normally expect. Some are blaming Japan and China for selling U.S. bonds, which would hurt the dollar. Others believe hedge funds unwinding leveraged positions in bonds may be to blame. But analysts and economists tell Fortune that as long as the White House continues to generate economic uncertainty, everyone is going to flee the dollar.
The value of the U.S. dollar ticked up yesterday after President Trump did a U-turn and said he had no intention of firing Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve. It was a rare piece of good news for the world’s “reserve currency,” whose value has fallen 9% year-to-date against the DXY index of foreign currencies.
That raises a question: Who is selling the dollar—or selling assets that drive down the dollar—and why?
Initial suspicions targeted Japan and China. After all, they are both seeing their export markets hurt by Trump’s trade war, and they are the first and second largest foreign holders of U.S. Treasuries. Perhaps those countries were trying to send a message to Trump: Remember, we can hurt you too!
However, sources tell Fortune that there is little to no evidence that either country is deliberately tanking the dollar.
Trump’s chop-change economic pronouncements have generated so much global uncertainty that investors across all assets — stocks, bonds, and currency — are simply withdrawing from the U.S. until some kind of certainty reappears.
Japan is selling a lot of all its foreign bond holdings — it dumped $20 billion recently — “not just U.S. Treasuries,” according to Oxford Economics’ Lead Analyst John Canavan. “Because Treasuries make up such a large portion of Japanese foreign bond holdings, it is generally seen as a good proxy.”
But, he says, “it’s not clear China and/or Japan have been responsible for the extent of the recent Treasury market selloff and volatility. Evidence is difficult to come by either way. Data on foreign transactions and holdings of Treasury debt tend to be released with a lag, so they could have played a role, but it doesn’t appear at first blush that they were the primary factor.”
Not the hedge funds
Canavan is also not keen on the hedge fund theory.
“Early suspicions that an unwinding of large leveraged basis trades were a significant factor appear to have been incorrect. The Commitments of Traders data from the CFTC over the past two weeks offered no evidence of any basis trade unwinds,” he told Fortune.
His colleagues at Goldman Sachs agree, in part.
In a note to clients published April 22, analysts Kamakshya Trivedi and Dominic Wilson said: “We did not see much support either in the ‘footprint’ across markets or in the flow data for the theories of significant foreign selling, though there is more evidence that levered unwinds (particularly the sharp move in swap spreads) may have played a role.”
China and Japan actually have a vested interest in not selling U.S. bonds because that only hurts their need for stable assets and would make their currencies rise, which in turn would hurt their export markets.
“Take China, for instance,” says Kevin Ford, FX & macro strategist at Convera.
“As America’s second-largest foreign creditor after Japan, it holds around $780 billion in Treasury securities. While their market moves are closely watched, a massive sell-off seems unlikely, as it would strengthen the Yuan due to repatriation effects, and Beijing is currently leveraging its currency to counter tariff impacts.”
“Hedge funds, on the other hand, might have added fuel to the fire. As the bond sell-off gained momentum, margin calls could have forced funds to liquidate Treasuries to raise cash, especially those employing bond-basis trades,” he told Fortune.
Everyone wants to get the hell out of Dodge
In fact, there is a simpler explanation: The dollar is in decline and yields on U.S. bonds are staying high because everyone — literally everyone on the planet — wants to get the hell out of Dodge City right now.
That includes stocks, bonds, and currency. With Trump changing his mind by the hour on trade policy and bullying his chief central banker on a daily basis, investors of all kinds are simply limiting their exposure to a nation they now regard as a risk asset rather than a safe haven.
This aversion to the U.S. has even started showing up in shipping routes. With tariffs restricting trade, the number of “blank sailings” to the U.S. by ocean freighters has doubled since February, according to data tracked by Project44, a supply chain platform. Blank sailings occur when a shipping line schedules a route and then cancels it altogether or skips a port on that route.
“The East Coast is set to see a peak of 24 blank sailings in the last week of May, a 100% increase since new tariffs began in February, with the West Coast close behind at 21, or a 31% increase,” the company says.
While shipping doesn’t directly affect the dollar, it is—arguably—a visible symptom of a world withdrawing from doing business with the U.S.
Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives, who covers the tech market, even has a name for it. In a note to clients dated April 22, he called it the “Sell America Trade.”
“This tariff/trade war is cutting US tech at the knees and helping steamroll China tech ahead,” he wrote.
And as long as the trade war continues, expect the dollar to continue to decline, according to Goldman Sachs.
“We believe the re-think of the risk and reward of Dollar assets has room to run and expect the USD to extend its declines over time,” Goldman’s Trivedi and Wilson said.
Good morning! Female U.S. soldiers must now pass “sex-neutral” physical test, L.A. mayor Karen Bass proposes government workforce layoffs, and the Trump administration may incentivize women to have more babies.
– Baby boom. The Trump administration has been soliciting ideas for ways to entice Americans to have more children, according to a report in the New York Times, in an effort to combat what it sees as a crisis of falling birth rates in the U.S. Some of the proposals reportedly being floated: a $5,000 cash “baby bonus,” government-funded educational programs on menstrual cycles, and a “National Medal of Motherhood” awarded to mothers with six or more children.
The idea generation is the clearest example yet of the Trump administration’s embrace of “a new cultural agenda pushed by many of its allies on the right to reverse declining birthrates and push conservative family values,” the Times reports.
Indeed, Trump, who has described himself as the “fertilization president,” is surrounded by folks like tech billionaire Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance, who could be described as pro-natalist. Project 2025, the ultra-conservative blueprint for Trump’s second term, calls for the promotion of heterosexual marriages and restricting reproductive rights and health care.
Critics have been quick to point out that structural changes that could actually help families long term—paid parental leave, affordable housing and childcare—are not among the ideas listed in the story. And when the average out-of-pocket costs for giving birth in the U.S. total $2,854 for those with insurance while part-time childcare costs $6,000 a year on the low end, any baby bonus won’t go very far.
“Proposals like ‘baby bonuses’ or ‘menstrual cycle classes’ don’t just miss the point, they leave millions of women unheard, yet again,” says Erin Erenberg, CEO and cofounder of Chamber of Mothers, a nonpartisan 501c3 organization advocating for maternal and parental rights. “Most women we hear from aren’t opting out of motherhood—rather, they simply can’t afford it. That’s not a cultural crisis. That’s a policy failure.”
Countries across Asia and Europe are also struggling with falling birth rates, and many have tried similar incentives. South Korea, which has the lowest birth rate in the world, has introduced a baby bonus, as has Singapore. At least in South Korea, the generous government benefits are so far not enough: The fertility rate in 2024 was 0.75, a small increase from the previous year.
Back in the U.S., critics point to other moves made by the Trump administration that seem to belie its stated desire for a “baby boom.” It recently made large cuts to the Department of Health and Human Service’s Division of Reproductive Health, which handles issues related to maternal and infant health. Republicans also opposed the extension of the expanded child tax credit, which helped significantly reduce child poverty under President Joe Biden. The Trump administration’s aggressive immigration and deportation strategies are counter to the goal of growing the population. And in many red states, anti-abortion legislation is actively harming women and motherswho miscarry. Overall maternal mortality rates in the U.S. almost doubled between 2014 and 2021.
“Parenthood doesn’t need to be incentivized—it needs to be supported every step of the way,” says Erenberg. “If we want a thriving nation, we start by making sure its mothers are healthy, supported, and whole.”
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Politics8 years ago