• The CEO of payments company Klarna has warned that AI could lead to job cuts and a recession.
• Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he believed AI would increasingly replace white-collar jobs.
• Klarna previously said its AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents.

The CEO of the Swedish payments company Klarna says that the rise of artificial intelligence could lead to a recession as the technology replaces white-collar jobs.

Speaking on The Times Tech podcast, Sebastian Siemiatkowski said there would be "an implication for white-collar jobs," which he said "usually leads to at least a recession in the short term."

"Unfortunately, I don't see how we could avoid that, with what's happening from a technology perspective," he continued.

Siemiatkowski, who has long been candid about his belief that AI will come for human jobs, added that AI had played a key role in "efficiency gains" at Klarna and that the firm's workforce had shrunk from about 5,500 to 3,000 people in the last two years as a result.

It's not the first time the exec and Klarna have made headlines along these lines.

In February 2024, Klarna boasted that its OpenAI-powered AI assistant was doing the work of 700 full-time customer service agents. The company, most famous for its "buy now, pay later" service, was one of the first firms to partner with Sam Altman's company.

Later that year, Siemiatkowski told Bloomberg TV that he believed AI was already capable of doing "all of the jobs" that humans do and that Klarna had enacted a hiring freeze since 2023 as it looked to slim down and focus on adopting the technology.

However, Siemiatkowski has since dialed back his all-in stance on AI, telling an audience at the firm's Stockholm headquarters in May that his AI-driven customer service cost-cutting efforts had gone too far and that Klarna was planning to now recruit, according to Bloomberg.

"From a brand perspective, a company perspective, I just think it's so critical that you are clear to your customer that there will be always a human if you want," he said.

In the interview with The Times, Siemiatkowski said he felt that many people in the tech industry, particularly CEOs, tended to "downplay the consequences of AI on jobs, white-collar jobs in particular."

"I don't want to be one of them," he said. "I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations."

Some of the top leaders in AI, however, have been ringing the alarm lately, too.

Anthropic's leadership has been particularly outspoken about the threat AI poses to the human labor market.

The company's CEO, Dario Amodei, recently said that AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years. "We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Amodei said. "I don't think this is on people's radar."

Similarly, his colleague, Mike Krieger, Anthropic's chief product officer, said he is hesitant to hire entry-level software engineers over more experienced ones who can also leverage AI tools.

The silver lining is that AI also brings the promise of better and more fulfilling work, Krieger said.

Humans, he said, should focus on "coming up with the right ideas, doing the right user interaction design, figuring out how to delegate work correctly, and then figuring out how to review things at scale — and that's probably some combination of maybe a comeback of some static analysis or maybe AI-driven analysis tools of what was actually produced."

• Ark Invest's Cathie Wood has weighed in on the public feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
• Wood said the feud reveals how much Musk's companies rely on the US government.
• Trump said Saturday he had no desire to fix his relationship with the Tesla CEO.

The public feud between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has shown investors just how much control the US government has over Musk's companies, Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood says.

"I think the way this is evolving is Elon, Tesla, and investors are beginning to understand more and more just how much the government has control here," Wood said in a video posted to the company's YouTube channel on Friday.

Many of Musk's companies have key links to the government and have received billions of dollars in federal loans, contracts, tax credits, and subsidies over the years.

"Elon is involved in companies that are depending on the government," Wood said, pointing to Tesla, SpaceX, and Neuralink as examples.

SpaceX's COO, Gwynne Shotwell, said last year that the company has $22 billion worth of federal contracts. Neuralink, Musk's brain chip company, is subject to FDA regulation, and a less friendly regulatory environment could impact Tesla's robotaxi rollout plans. Tesla stock fell more than 14% on Thursday after Musk and Trump became locked in a series of increasingly bitter clashes.

The feud appeared to begin, at least publicly, on Tuesday, after Musk criticized Trump's "One Big Beautiful Bill." He called it a "disgusting abomination" and said it would increase the national budget deficit.

Tensions rose fast between the once-close allies on Thursday. Trump threatened to cut Musk's government contracts and Musk said SpaceX would immediately begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft — which returned stranded NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from the International Space Station in March.

Musk later retracted that threat, which Wood said was a sign he was "beginning to walk this back."

Wood said the rift with Trump could, in part, be Musk's attempt to further decouple himself from the Trump administration. Musk announced in April that he would be stepping back from his government work.

"One of the hypotheses out there is that what has happened was partly — not entirely — orchestrated," Wood said. "Clearly, there has been some brand damage to Tesla, which he readily admits, and I think he's trying to disengage from the government and being associated with one party or the other."

Moving forward, Wood said neither Trump nor Musk needed to get "bogged down" with a fight and that she believed both would eventually heed that reasoning.

She also appeared to be confident that Musk could make the situation work for him. She said Musk "works really well under pressure" and that "he creates a lot of that chaos and pressure himself."

Trump, however, signaled Saturday that he had no desire to fix his relationship with the SpaceX CEO anytime soon.

"I have no intention of speaking to him," Trump told NBC News.

"I think it's a very bad thing, because he's very disrespectful. You could not disrespect the office of the President," he added.

Vice President JD Vance struck a somewhat friendlier tone when asked about the possibility of reconciliation during a Thursday interview with podcaster Theo Von.

Vance said that while he thought it was a "huge mistake" for Musk to "go after the president," he hoped Musk "figures it out" and "comes back into the fold."