Klarna's CEO spent 2024 on a media tour telling anyone who would listen that AI had done the work of 700 full-time employees. By December of that year, headcount had dropped from 4,500 to 3,500, and he was on Bloomberg saying AI can already do every job humans do. In May 2025, he went back on Bloomberg and said the whole thing produced "lower quality." Now Klarna is rehiring.

The catch: those jobs aren't coming back the same way. The roles are gig contracts, 400 Swedish krona an hour (about $41), no benefits, no guaranteed hours. Juan and Kate walk through the full timeline of the reversal, a Gartner study of 350 executives that found no correlation between AI-driven headcount cuts and higher ROI, and the counterexample nobody expects: IKEA, which faced the same pressure, retrained its call center workers as interior designers, and made $1.4 billion from it.

Who decided a thousand jobs was acceptable math?

ABOUT SLOP WORLD

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday.

DISCLAIMER

All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Did AI Really Replace 700 Workers — or Just the Story?

0:44 Meet Klarna: The Buy Now Pay Later Company That Bet on AI

1:17 The Brag: AI Handles Two-Thirds of All Customer Service

2:11 The Media Tour: He Wanted to Be OpenAI's Guinea Pig

4:31 The Bloomberg Reversal: "Lower Quality"

6:04 Is AI Actually Paying Off? What 350 Executives Found

8:15 Still Calling Itself "AI First" While Quietly Rehiring

9:15 The Catch: Gig Contracts, $41/Hour, No Benefits

11:01 What IKEA Did Instead — And Made $1.4 Billion

13:35 Who Decided 1,000 Jobs Was Acceptable Math?

Derek Mobley applied to over 100 jobs through Workday's hiring system between 2017 and 2024. He was rejected every single time. According to Workday's own court filings, he wasn't the only one. The software has processed 1.1 billion rejections. One point one billion.

A federal judge ruled in May 2025 that Workday isn't just a software vendor in this situation. The court found them to be an "agent" of the employer, which means they can be sued directly for how their tools screen, score, and reject candidates. That's the first time a federal court has said that about an AI company. The "we just make the tool" defense is gone.

Juan and Kate break down the three-step AI hiring pipeline most applicants never see, how a 1:50 a.m. rejection timestamp became a federal court exhibit, and why the underlying legal theory has actually been on the books since 1971. The law didn't change. It just finally caught up.

If you're over 40 and you've been applying to jobs at Fortune 500 companies since 2020, you may be eligible to join the collective action. The opt-in deadline was March 7, 2026. It's already passed.

ABOUT SLOP WORLD

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday.

DISCLAIMER

All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Why Workday's AI Resume Screening Rejected Him at 1 AM

01:54 The 1:50 AM Rejection That Sparked a Federal Lawsuit

02:30 How Algorithmic Hiring Actually Works

04:50 Disparate Impact and the Amazon Hiring Algorithm

06:00 Workday's Defense: We Just Make the Tool

07:17 Why the Court Ruled Workday Is an Employer

11:01 March 2026: Why Job Applicants Can Now Sue

13:31 What This Means for Every AI Company

Mercor is a $10 billion AI staffing company that supplies the human workforce training ChatGPT, Meta's models, and Anthropic's Claude: doctors, lawyers, and journalists doing the reinforcement learning the labs would rather not advertise. Last month, hackers walked out with 4 terabytes of their data, including 40,000 Social Security numbers, passport scans, and W9 tax forms. Mercor said nothing.

The entry point was three steps upstream. LightLLM, an open-source Python tool downloaded 95 million times a month, had malicious code quietly pushed into a public repository. Forty minutes later, attackers had 900GB of Mercor's source code, 200GB of contractor personal data, and a direct window into the training pipelines of the biggest AI labs in the world. A company valued at $10 billion, fresh off a $350 million Series C, had zero multi-factor authentication on the systems holding that data.

The SOC 2 certification that was supposed to catch exactly this? A whistleblower confirmed the auditing firm was rubber-stamping its reviews. The people certifying AI infrastructure as secure weren't checking. They were signing.

If you work in AI, use AI tools, or assumed someone responsible was watching the infrastructure, this is what that looks like.

ABOUT SLOP WORLD

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Thursday.

DISCLAIMER

All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.

CHAPTERS

00:00 A $10B AI Contractor Got Hacked. 40,000 SSNs Gone.

01:45 Meet Mercor: The Hidden Company Training ChatGPT

04:07 How the Hack Worked in 40 Minutes

07:27 What a Stolen SSN Does to You

09:11 The Security Audit Was a Rubber Stamp

13:52 The Workers Knew. Nobody Listened.

16:42 Who F***ed Up: Mercor, the AI Labs, or Everyone?