JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says he welcomes government ban on mass-firing people for AI: ‘We’re going to cure a lot of cancers’

Speaking at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, the company’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, admitted he’ll likely employ fewer workers in the next five years—but warned that rushing into AI-driven layoffs without safeguards could backfire, potentially triggering “civil unrest.”

Instead, the 69-year-old said he’d even welcome government bans on replacing masses of workers with AI. But before it gets to that stage, he already has ideas up his sleeve to protect some of the 300,000-plus employees on his payroll.

“I have a plan to retrain people, relocate people, income-assist people,” Dimon said.

Dimon pointed to the roughly 2-million-strong commercial trucking industry as an example. A sudden shift to fully autonomous trucking, he said, could displace workers who currently earn well into six figures, leaving them struggling to make ends meet.

“Phase it in. Retrain.” he said. “You can’t lay off 2 million truckers tomorrow. You can phase it in over time.”

And if that doesn’t suffice and government intervention is needed to prevent companies from cutting jobs too aggressively, Dimon said he would support it—especially if it comes from local incentives.

“We would agree—if we have to do that to save society,” he said. “Society will have more production. We’re going to cure a lot of cancers. You’re not going to slow it down. How do you have plans in place to make it work better if it does something terrible?”

Workers may soon find unlikely allies in billionaires like Jamie Dimon, Elon Musk, and Sam Altman

So far, job cuts directly tied to AI have been limited; in 2025, just 55,000 positions were eliminated as a result of automation—accounting for more than 75% of all AI-related cuts reported since 2023, according to analysis from recruiting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

However, AI leaders like pioneering computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton said the worst is yet to come.

“What’s actually going to happen is rich people are going to use AI to replace workers,” the “Godfather of AI” said last September. “It’s going to create massive unemployment and a huge rise in profits. It will make a few people much richer and most people poorer. That’s not AI’s fault, that is the capitalist system.”

Dimon’s contrasting remarks are likely to offer some reassurance to workers, signaling that at least some business leaders recognize that replacing employees with AI—without policies to support those displaced—could have serious social consequences.

Still, he admitted, similar efforts haven’t worked well in the past. Dimon pointed to the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance program—which provides support to workers who lose jobs or see wages decline as a result of offshoring—as a cautionary tale, calling it “incredibly poorly done.”

That failure, Dimon added, doesn’t mean new approaches in the AI era can’t succeed.

“Don’t put your head in the sand. It is what it is,” he said.

But Dimon isn’t the first billionaire executive thinking about how society should respond if AI significantly reduces the need for human labor.

Elon Musk has repeatedly argued that advances in AI and robotics will eventually make universal income unavoidable. 

“There will be no poverty in the future and so no need to save money,” Musk wrote in a post on X, his social media platform. “There will be universal high income.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long taken a similar view, advocating for what he described in a 2016 Y Combinator blog post as, “giving people enough money to live on with no strings attached.”

“I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”