Jamie Dimon is funding the AI boom and wants Washington to provide the safety net

THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM among Fortune 500 CEOs is that artificial intelligence will enhance workers, not replace them — that the correct posture is optimism tempered by vague references to "reskilling." Jamie Dimon's 2025 shareholder letter, published Monday, breaks from this script with unusual candor. The head of the world's largest bank by market capitalization — a firm spending $19.8 billion on technology this year and explicitly trying to become "fundamentally rewired" for the AI era — concedes that AI deployment "may move faster than workforce adaptation to new job creation." Then he proposes a specific policy response: double the Earned Income Tax Credit and convert it into a monthly negative income tax. Coming from a CEO whose bank posted $57 billion in net income last year, it is a signal worth parsing.

The letter is, as always, expansive — nearly 60 pages covering geopolitics, bank regulation, trade policy, and a Europe section that reads like a foreign-policy white paper. But threaded through the sprawl is a remarkably detailed AI thesis. Dimon calls AI genuinely transformational and argues its adoption will likely be far faster than prior technological shifts like electricity or the internet, which took decades to roll out. He forecasts hyperscaler AI capital spending jumping from $450 billion in 2025 to roughly $725 billion in 2026 — a 61% increase in a single year — and says the investment is "not a speculative bubble." He acknowledges AI will "definitely eliminate some jobs" while enhancing others, and states that JPMorgan has "definitive plans" for supporting and redeploying affected employees.

The $20 billion confession

Yet the letter's most striking passage is the one where Dimon's dual roles — as AI accelerator and AI worrier — collide. He writes that in prior technological transformations, "labor had time to adjust and retrain," but concedes that AI may not afford the same luxury. This is not an abstract concern for JPMorgan. At an investor meeting in February, Dimon revealed that the bank has already displaced workers due to AI and has launched what he called "huge redeployment plans" to move them into other roles. The bank's overall headcount held steady at roughly 318,500 over the past year, but the composition shifted beneath the surface: operations staff fell 4%, support roles dropped 2%, while client-facing and revenue-generating positions grew 4%. Operations teams now handle 6% more accounts per employee, fraud-related costs per unit have dropped 11%, and software engineer productivity has risen 10%.