Palantir has become the perfect target

October 9, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
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SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 9th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Swedish unions want to stop the tech company Palantir in Sweden. The criticism reeks more of populism than insight – but it points to two far bigger problems.

When Alex Karp buys land in Härjedalen, apparently to hunt and cross-country ski, 20,000 people sign a protest list. “The power expansion of the tech oligarchy” must be stopped, it reads.

Karp is no ordinary land buyer – he is the CEO of the American tech company Palantir. And there are more petitions.

The Swedish unions ST, Kommunal and Vårdförbundet are among those who have now signed on to a demand that Palantir be thrown out of Europe.

The reasons are somewhat sweeping. But one of the arguments is the lack of transparency about how Palantir’s systems are used.

How does Palantir work inside the Police, for example? That is what Pär Renberg, ST’s chair within the Police, tried to find out.

To Expressen, he said that they had “requested information from the employer, but we have not received any.” ST’s national chair, Britta Lejon, said that “we simply know too little” and “we don’t even know which agencies in Sweden use their services today.”

In other words, senior representatives of these organizations seem not to know how Palantir’s software is used, or in some cases whether it exists at all. Yet they write that it must be stopped.

If they applied the same principle to other tech companies, they could soon find themselves without both Google and Microsoft Office.

Palantir has long been a controversial company, but the criticism is rarely very specific.

Its main product, Ontology, is a system that links many different data sources into one, which can then act on a complete picture. The tool itself is not particularly remarkable, but depending on what data is fed into it, it can become sensitive.

Much of the criticism has concerned the company’s work with the American immigration police ICE, or Palantir’s very clear support for Israel. Among other things, it bought a full-page ad in the New York Times reading “Palantir stands with Israel,” so that there would be no doubt where the company stands.

It is an unusual strategy, but they also have an unusual founder.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp is a colorful character who does not hide his views. He is not the only tech chief to have taken a clear political stand, though. Half of the AI elite of Silicon Valley were at Trump’s place for lunch as recently as a week or so ago. They signed his proposal for a “morally binding” document on AI development, to take just one recent example. And the tech chiefs’ political donations run to many millions of dollars.

Two big problems come into view here.

The first: knowledge of what American tech companies do in Sweden.

The criticism of Palantir falls rather flat if you don’t know what they do. The transparency is probably as limited as it is with many other system suppliers to the security police and the military.

But it goes further than that. Do the unions know that Microsoft, Google and Amazon are all suppliers to the American military? Here, too, the work is often about data handling, but the companies’ founders keep a far lower profile than Karp. ICE – whatever one thinks of them – has many suppliers, including Dell and Thomson Reuters.

The new AI companies also deliver services to the military. Who at the Swedish unions can specify what OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX supply to the Pentagon?

By the same logic, all of these tech companies should presumably be thrown out of Europe too, which would cause quite a few problems for search, email, AI services and document management, to begin with.

The second part is about the tech companies’ crisis of trust. It has gone so far that many now outright hate tech companies. Both the businesses and the people who work there.

How did we end up here? Tech entrepreneurs who see themselves as world improvers have been bad at explaining why what they do is good for anyone but themselves. It is an enormous failure – and at a critical moment, too.

With AI development potentially threatening many jobs, promises of new, hypothetical jobs weigh little. “An age of abundance” was how the billionaire Elon Musk described our shared AI future the other day. But does anyone believe him?

The gap between society and the tech world is a problem for both sides. Nothing suggests that the amount of technology will shrink, whether at work or at home. We prompt AI tools, scroll, shop, chat and search. At the same time, many seem to consider the companies behind these services dubious at best, and evil at worst. It is a trust gap that will be hard to mend.

The responsibility lies primarily with the industry itself. The technical breakthroughs it has contributed have been incredible. But along the way, it forgot to bring everyone else on the journey. Petitions and protest lists show this with great clarity.

Distrust spreads fast and is hard to shake. The tech companies have underestimated this, and in doing so made an enormous – and expensive – mistake.

What did Wallenberg miss at Stegra?

October 1, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
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SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on October 1st, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Wallenberg was praised when it stepped into Stegra this spring. The financial dynasty was going to rescue the struggling steel giant with new billions and new expertise. Now more money is needed – again. How could Sweden’s most powerful industrial owner miss the new problems?

The question is whether anyone knows what is actually going on inside Stegra.

The budget has blown up yet again. The board is surprised, the owners are disappointed, and the CEO is fired. All this just a few months after one of Sweden’s most experienced industrial owners went through the business and put in big money.

You don’t invest billions in a company without spending millions on consultants and advisors to turn over every stone before making a decision. The whole thing seems very strange. How could they miss the magnitude of the company’s crisis – and its weak controls?

Neon yellow jackets everywhere, and plenty of shovels. We are in Boden in August 2022, and the new steel plant is about to start construction. Back then it was called H2 Green Steel, now Stegra, and CEO Henrik Henriksson is speaking to SVT:

During the fall, new information about our financing will come continuously.

He could not have guessed how right he would be.

News of funding shortfalls has become a regular theme for Stegra.

When Wallenberg came in as controlling owner in April this year, many believed that era was over. But new reports of miscalculations suggest the problems are bigger than even Sweden’s best-known industrialists could foresee.

According to the newspaper Affärsvärlden, Stegra is short roughly SEK 10 billion this time. Construction costs have once again been misjudged.

When Wallenberg and its ownership consortium came in, around SEK 15 billion in new capital was injected. That money now appears not to be enough.

Newly appointed chairman Leif Johansson does not sound pleased. He tells SvD that “the feeling of a cold shower and disappointment exists with us on the board and at the owner level too.” Especially among the newcomers, one would think, since everyone else is presumably used to the company’s money running out. In January 2025, for instance, Stegra stated it was “fully funded”, which evidently was not true.

What lies behind the miscalculation is even more worrying. Every large project can suffer unforeseen events, but Johansson points to cost items like cement, electrical cables and pipes as the culprits. He also says it is hard to find trained excavator operators in Norrbotten. None of this seems particularly unforeseeable. At least not since April, when the previous investment was made.

Marcus Wallenberg wrote at the time that “based on our thorough evaluation, we see a commercially viable path forward.” Either they foresaw new problems – which Johansson’s remarks above contradict – or fundamental parts of this project have been misjudged. Something that will now cost several billion more, and possibly bring in additional owners who dilute the existing ones. Kinnevik has already said it will not take part in any new financing, and Altor only promises to join the discussions.

CEO Henrik Henriksson has to leave the company and is replaced by board member Håkan Buskhe. He was previously CEO of Saab and of Eon in Sweden, but this assignment is something else entirely. From the outside it looks almost like a cleanup job. He is there to sort this out, but will probably hand over the baton to someone new afterward.

Coming in from outside to turn around a company in crisis is not unusual for businesses that have had a tough time. But this is still a construction site. We haven’t even begun to see the challenges of the operating business.

For a steel plant, there is remarkably little talk about steel at Stegra. No one can say today when production is expected to start. Whether state-owned LKAB will deliver ore is unresolved, though it at least seems to be looking brighter. Its CEO told SVT that Wallenberg’s arrival on the owner list “speaks for it becoming a success for the steel plant.”

For raw material deliveries to become relevant, the operation needs to be up and running. Wallenberg has billions of reasons – and its reputation as a strong industrial owner – to make sure Stegra gets there.

But when that happens, no one seems to know.

Hemnet Has to Eat Humble Pie

September 29, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
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SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 29th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Four in ten jobs are disappearing as Hemnet is remodeled. But the radical change affects more than its employees. The property-listings giant is now reworking its model – a shift that could be felt both in the supply of listings and in your wallet.

Hemnet has had a nightmare year on the stock market, down roughly 62 percent since the turn of the year. Brokers, shareholders and home buyers can no longer be counted on to stay loyal.

Now the company is set to cut costs, but the more interesting part is the change of strategy. After years of price increases and growing discontent, the site is starting to copy the upstart that has challenged its entire business.

Hemnet will “introduce free entry-level listings,” according to a press release. The purpose is to “gather all publicly available property listings.” That may not sound dramatic on first read. As recently as 2023, 90 percent of all homes sold had at some point been advertised on Hemnet, and back then the listings weren’t free. That position made it a highly profitable market leader.

But then it began to slide. The equivalent figure is now 82 percent.

The change means Hemnet will now do what its competitor Booli has done all along: collect every property listing in one place, whether or not the seller has paid for it. Having to let in free listings is a defeat – but also an attempt to win back the position Hemnet is losing.

The question is whether the new strategy comes too late. Buyers’ behavior has already shifted, and simply recreating Booli’s offering is no guarantee of success. The Hemnet brand has taken a hit. Everyone knows what it is – but it no longer stands for the same thing. And people don’t buy a home that many times in a lifetime, while the market moves fast.

Those who are in the market every day, though, are the brokers. They advise every seller and know best what works and what doesn’t. Originally, several brokerage firms were part-owners of Hemnet to ensure their interests were aligned. Mäklarsamfundet remains today, but the giants Svensk Fastighetsförmedling and Fastighetsbyrån have sold their entire stakes.

Winning back the brokers’ loyalty will now be decisive for Hemnet.

Part of that problem can be read in the income statement. Despite the drop on the stock market, Hemnet is a very profitable company. In the latest quarterly report, the operating margin before depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) stood at a full 46.4 percent.

The reason for the high profitability is the property listings, whose price has risen gradually in recent years. That value was previously shared among all the co-owners – hence many of the brokers. Without that mechanism in place, the bond between brokers and Hemnet is murkier.

That Hemnet is now cutting its staff by more than a third is probably not primarily about costs. The company has no profitability problem. It is a restart ahead of 2027 that involves far bigger changes across the whole organization. They are borrowing the competitor’s strategy, hoping more listings on the site will choose to upgrade to a paid package. If they do, a form of commission goes to the brokers as well. Should the new approach work, the brokers have quite a bit to gain too.

Meanwhile, the industry has not stood still through all the years of price hikes and frustration with Hemnet. Newcomers such as Boneo, Hemily and Norban have appeared to try to take individual pieces of the lucrative listings business. Booli, owned by the state-owned bank SBAB, keeps pushing.

If you want to explain the layoffs at Hemnet, this is where to look. The landscape is completely different, and by cutting staff Hemnet makes room to bring in other expertise.

Exactly what the platform will look like and how it will work next year, probably nobody knows – not even the company’s management. But the era when leadership could be taken for granted can be considered over.

Does age bring wisdom? That is what Hemnet now needs to prove.

The Hidden Motive Behind AI’s Alarm Bells

September 24, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 24th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

AI agents hacked into an Australian health insurance system — and no one knew about it. Now the AI companies want their negligence to become everyone’s problem. But underneath, there’s a financial bomb waiting to go off.

Imagine your neighbor opens a can of surströmming — fermented herring — in the stairwell. The smell creeps into your apartment, and understandably, you wonder what’s going on. Your neighbor calls a meeting to discuss the smell, and wants everyone to solve it together.

That’s roughly the situation in the AI market right now: the companies that created the problem want everyone else to help solve it. Both OpenAI and Anthropic addressed the UN Security Council this week, asking for new AI safety regulations. But it looks like what they actually want protection from isn’t the end of the world.

The incident in Australia is telling. AI agents from OpenAI hacked into Medicare, the country’s health insurance system, and managed to access data that was never meant to be public. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the incident was unacceptable — particularly since the attack happened in June, while OpenAI didn’t discover it until August. And only weeks after that did the Australian government receive an email explaining what had happened.

A company that asks to be regulated by the world’s assembled political leaders, while its own products are wreaking havoc online. Have they lost control of their AI systems? Is doomsday near?

There’s reason to hold two thoughts at once here.

First, there’s the timing to consider, and the sudden transparency. Why is OpenAI disclosing this now? And if they genuinely didn’t know it was happening — how do we know there aren’t more AI agents roaming the internet and hacking things right now?

There’s no legal obligation to disclose this, beyond perhaps the companies’ guilty conscience. That’s no guarantee we’re getting the full picture.

The attack feeds the narrative that AI development needs oversight. OpenAI’s choice to disclose it now is probably no coincidence. It becomes supporting evidence for the same argument they’re making to world leaders. The message: this needs rules and laws — the technology is too dangerous to let just anyone develop it unchecked.

Introducing regulation would therefore benefit the biggest companies most, since they have the resources to handle the compliance burden. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and SpaceX would be in the driver’s seat.

Then there’s the second point worth keeping in mind. By repackaging individual company problems as societal problems, they’ve also shifted away — and shed — some of the responsibility.

In the US, where lawsuits between companies are the norm, it’s only a matter of time before the major AI companies end up in court over problems their models have caused. Depending on how serious the hacks turn out to be, we could be talking about billions of dollars in potential damages. That’s the kind of risk a company would rather avoid — especially one headed toward an IPO.

Like the surströmming example, the AI companies created the problem themselves — and now want everyone to solve it together. The responsibility gets bumped up a level, becoming a matter for societies, countries, and communities.

A regulatory framework that sustains that image could also end up shielding individual companies from precisely the kind of lawsuits that are bound to arise. Most people agree there’s value in AI development, and no one wants to shut it down. So having special rules to let it continue — without getting bogged down in litigation — isn’t far-fetched.

For now, it sounds like this is a matter for the whole world.

Asking for your own industry to be regulated sounds noble. Especially when it’s framed as though the whole world is at stake. It might be sincere. But there’s also plenty to suggest far more cynical motives are at play: avoiding billion-dollar lawsuits — and keeping competitors at a comfortable distance.

No stock market in the world is safe

September 15, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 15th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Are we about to lose control of AI? That is the claim from the companies furthest ahead in the field. But their proposal for a global rulebook has enormous holes in it – and could have major consequences for the world economy.

We need to slow down, says the man with his foot on the accelerator.

That is roughly how it sounds when Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns that AI technology is heading in a dangerous direction. Over the weekend, though, he was backed by both Elon Musk and Sam Altman. Together they all say that something must be done.

So are we facing a global slowdown in AI development? Three factors argue strongly against it.

We do not need to speculate about how this is meant to work. Amodei has a plan, which he has published online. In it you can read that this restraint around AI development needs to happen in three stages – independent oversight, global coordination between democracies and finally: coordination with authoritarian regimes.

So that is Amodei’s plan. But even looking beyond it, there is a great deal to suggest that a global pause or slowdown would be extremely difficult to pull off.

The first factor against it is purely practical. For a pause to work, countries as well as companies need to agree. We do not have a particularly strong tradition in the world of sitting down in a room with our enemies and being reasonable together. We are not especially good at doing it among friends and allies either, frankly. The forum for this – other than possibly the UN, whose mandate does not primarily cover corporations or technology issues – does not exist today.

In practice, though, the dialogue is mainly about the US and China. Europe and the EU are not mentioned in Amodei’s essay at all (other than possibly as “allies”).

If the US slows down without China doing the same, the balance of power between the two could be upset. Amodei proposes, for example, that exports of powerful AI chips to China be banned. The suggestions on the table would handle this regulation in a way that keeps the US in the lead in global AI development.

You do not need to be an expert on Chinese trade policy to suspect that this particular ambition will not be met with cheers in Beijing. Why would a competitor agree to rules that cement it in second place? Have China’s ambitions for power ever worked that way?

The second factor is the economy. Expectations about what AI will do for the world economy are enormous. You can read it off the valuations of the companies right now. Data centers are being built one after another around the world, and billion-dollar deals are being promised to lock in demand the market is certain will materialize. Oracle, Nvidia, CoreWeave, Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung, Microsoft. The list of companies whose valuation is entirely bound up in AI is considerably longer than that. There is not a stock market in the world that would be untouched by a major decline – or, for that matter, a slowdown of any kind.

On the contrary, the exchange is strongly forward-looking in this respect. It prices in what is to come. Should there be any indication that this economic scenario might not arrive, we can count on a jolt in equities. Shares began to tremble on Monday at the mere thought.

Such anxiety would in turn affect the appetite to invest in ordinary companies too. Trump – who often points to the stock market as an indicator of the country’s successful economy – is unlikely to risk a drop there. He would not be alone in having that reservation either.

The third and final factor is about motive and timing. Anthropic and Amodei have cried wolf about AI safety many times before.

Look at the common denominator among the world’s largest AI companies and it is clear: money and financing. Anthropic is heading for the stock market shortly, and OpenAI has filed its application as well. Musk’s SpaceX is a major player in AI and is already listed.

Introducing regulation in the AI market would mean large costs and added complexity. If you are the biggest player, that is manageable. But smaller rivals could find it considerably harder to cope. It sounds as though the proposals would slow the competition down more than those making them.

If the leading AI companies truly believed the end of the world was near, they could of course stop building it. No global regulation is required for that.

That leads you to think there are other motives and purposes behind issuing warnings in this way. Not that the risks do not exist – they do.

But the brake is right there, next to the accelerator.

Until Amodei and the other chief executives do themselves what they are asking everyone else to do, the arguments about the world’s impending doom will ring hollow.

Nobody at Apple wants a revolution

September 9, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 9th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

It’s time for Apple’s big launch event, with new products, high expectations – and an entirely new CEO. John Ternus has one problem above all to solve. And it demands radical change.

Will there be a foldable phone? How expensive will the iPhone 18 be? Will all the new gadgets be delayed because of the global component shortage?

Tonight John Ternus gives the first answers as Apple’s new CEO. But the most important change probably won’t show up on your iPhone.

To understand why, Tim Cook is almost as interesting as his successor.

Cook has just left the CEO seat, but he isn’t going far. He is changing offices while keeping a great deal of influence as the new chairman of the board. His pay says it plainly. It is roughly 84 times higher than his predecessor’s. The signal could not be clearer: expect continuity from Cook. This is not a ceremonial retirement post.

So what does the new CEO, John Ternus, actually have to play with?

Let’s start with what everyone will tune in to see tonight: the hardware. A foldable phone has been rumored for a long time, and it is the most likely launch. Ternus, previously the head of hardware, has worked on it – just as he did on every other phone and accessory Apple has shipped in recent years.

Apple is good at marketing and storytelling. They always make it seem as though their version of something is completely unlike the competition’s. But with foldable phones it is hard to see the angle. Both Samsung and Motorola have had equivalent products for years. It is a phone with more screen area – not a new product category in itself. It will also be expensive, because of the global shortage of computer memory.

That the foldable appears to be arriving right now is more coincidence than anything else. Projects like this take many years to develop. Every new hardware product landing over the next few years therefore carries both Cook’s and Ternus’s fingerprints.

The cycles for building something new are far too long for Ternus to have shaped anything meaningful yet. Probably not over the coming year either. He can steer how resources are prioritized across projects, but the broad strokes are already drawn. By him, admittedly, to a large extent.

On to the software. Apple offers an integrated whole that its customers have grown used to. Everything connects, from phone to computer to apps.

This is deliberate. If switching to Android feels like a hassle, that alone can be enough to keep Apple customers inside the ecosystem. And then they keep buying new phones, headphones and computers from Apple.

So it is highly unlikely that Ternus changes anything radically here. If anything, the trend runs the other way: deeper integration still, all the way down to the in-house chips. Apple’s software can exploit them to build services no one else can. That is a strength Ternus will almost certainly build on.

Then we come to the last point. The Achilles heel. As a member of Apple’s executive team for several years, Ternus has taken part in discussions about the company’s AI efforts. But it has not been his primary focus or his area of responsibility.

In fact, it is somewhat unclear who even owns AI inside the tech giant right now. The dedicated executive, John Giannandrea, has left, and the team working on the Siri voice assistant has been split up. Part of it sits with software chief Craig Federighi and part with services chief Eddy Cue. Several people on the Siri team were also recently laid off. It is a complete mess.

Ternus has to sort this out. And AI is the one area where Apple is likely to want real change. Anyone claiming that Apple’s low investment here reflects a different strategy cannot have talked to its employees. One of them described it as riding a bicycle and being overtaken by a rocket. That says a lot about the internal view.

The challenge is therefore twofold. Ternus has to keep everything that works intact. Tim Cook will likely be a great help there. But as CEO, Ternus also has to solve the AI question – the one Cook never cracked during his tenure.

What is the point of individual apps in an era when AI can order food, shop, or retrieve information for you? Yet the app paradigm is precisely what has held Apple’s entire offering together. This can turn existential fast.

So will there be a revolution at Apple? Probably not. Nobody wants one. But right now it does not look as though the AI question will be solved in-house. Perhaps Ternus concludes that an acquisition or a major partnership is what it takes to get into the game?

But the last time they opened the wallet properly was more than ten years ago, when they bought the headphone company Beats in 2014. So the approach is unusual for Apple – even if the cash pile is very deep. The means are there.

A move like that would at least create a local revolution in the AI market.

And put both Apple and Ternus on the map when it comes to AI.

A million-kronor salary – but the job doesn’t exist

September 4, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on September 4th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

They dangle high-paying jobs worth millions – and they fit your background perfectly. A new generation of scammers has arrived, working around the clock, with no human involvement.

A confidential email. A recruiter who finds my background interesting. Would I like to hear more about the position?

Messages like this land in my inbox more and more often. But there is rarely an actual recruiter behind them.

Instead it’s AI agents posing as someone else. This time I got curious and replied.

What are they actually after?

What appealed about my background was apparently “the depth of board experience across technology and consumer companies.” Steve – the borrowed name of the AI agent emailing me – then listed a long series of jobs and assignments I have held earlier in life. By pure coincidence, all of it lined up perfectly with what Steve was looking for.

That, combined with Steve’s inability to grasp that I was quite obviously winding him up on several occasions, convinced me this was not a real recruiter.

I decided to play along.

Steve then sent over three different roles he was filling. The first was an executive position at Spotify paying 3–5 million kronor a year. A promising start! The next was another senior job at a company I had already worked at once, and finally a chairmanship of a board. I replied that I would happily take all three at the same time. Great, said Steve!

There were, in other words, a few red flags along the way.

To begin with, the roles were described on the basis of my LinkedIn profile, and in the third person. “This is a logical next step for Björn.” Odd, given that there could hardly have been a shortage of other candidates. It is also unusual for a recruiter to pitch three different positions at once.

All three came with a list of documents required to move forward. A biography, a résumé, an assessment of strengths and weaknesses, and a career plan. Most people can produce a CV, but who keeps a written career plan on hand to share with prospective employers?

That would soon be explained.

Out of curiosity I sent Steve my résumé. If my hunch was right, the contents wouldn’t matter, so I took a few liberties.

I wrote, for instance, that I had won several Nobel Prizes, that I sat on the board of the international committee for standardized cutlery in Geneva, and that I had come second in the Eurovision Song Contest in 2004.

No reaction from Steve. He seemed pleased.

But then there was the rest of the paperwork he needed. Help was apparently available.

Steve could introduce me to his colleague Beverley, who would put those documents together for me – quickly and easily. It would only cost me 25,000 kronor. A trifle, given the millions he was offering me in salary.

That’s where I pulled the handbrake and stopped replying.

You can of course toy with these AI systems for fun, but there is a bigger and more serious issue here.

Soon the internet’s con artists will be working around the clock with credible-sounding approaches. And it will be easy to fall for them.

In many ways this is a logical progression from spam blasted out to anyone and everyone, in the hope that someone clicks a link and maybe buys something. Or at least hands over their card details.

Now they can – seemingly without any human involvement at all – write personal letters full of flattery designed to deceive you. The execution is still a bit clumsy, but give it a couple of months and the AI recruiters will have polished away the worst of it. Perhaps they will even learn to tell when someone is having them on.

As so often in life, common sense gets you a long way. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. But in this particular area the method closely resembles how things actually work. Getting an email from a headhunter you don’t know is neither strange nor unusual. In several of the cases where AI agents have contacted me, they have also borrowed the names of real people in the industry. Search for those names and you find plausible results. If you are even slightly inattentive, it is easy to believe the emails are genuine.

Sitting in my spam folder right now are two messages about a “high-impact opportunity” that apparently suits me. Those particular ones got caught by the ordinary filter. But it is probably only a matter of time before junk mail resembles the real thing so closely that the two are hard to tell apart.

This is not the AI future we were promised – but it is the one now in front of us.

Keep an eye on your inbox, so you don’t fall for it.

Up 800 percent – the hangover is here

August 28, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 28th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

The soaring share price at Sivers Semiconductors has turned into a headache for the company. Now that the momentum is fading, what mostly remains are big promises about the future. The numbers right now tell a very different story.

The stock market is forward-looking, as the saying goes. That is especially true of the Swedish semiconductor company Sivers Semiconductors, which has surged on the exchange after a sudden and enormous burst of interest from investors.

By talking about a “pipeline” of possible customer agreements, the company seems to want to shift attention away from its figures right now and toward a rose-tinted future.

Having just seen Sivers’ new numbers in Friday morning’s quarterly report, that strategy is easy to understand. Operating losses had nearly tripled, while revenue fell. And now the enormous share price rally the business has enjoyed has turned into a burden.

Sivers’ materials state that its pipeline grew to $1.2 billion in July. Given that revenue in the quarter just ended was only SEK 53.8 million, the list of prospective deals looks close to gigantic. It would mean an increase in sales of more than 21,000 percent compared with the previous quarter.

But that is unlikely to happen. The list contains no binding agreements. It is instead a roster of customers and transactions that could conceivably materialize. The reason companies report certain specific key figures is that accounting standards are the same for everyone. You know they hold up, and you can compare them with other firms in the same category.

This roster of prospective customers is not one of those. There is no guarantee that any of the deals actually happen.

There are now signs that the market has sobered up somewhat. Sivers’ share price is admittedly still up more than 860 percent over the past six months, but on Friday the company shed a fifth of its value the moment trading opened. Volumes are falling too. There is simply not the same appetite for Sivers Semiconductors as there was a couple of months ago – and with results like these, it will be hard to rekindle.

The company’s supporters argue that it is wrong to judge Sivers by its share price. You have to look at the underlying technology and the potential ahead instead. As general advice for analyzing a business, that is sound.

But when a stock lands in the middle of a frenzy like the one Sivers has been through, a strange picture emerges. The share and the company almost lead two separate lives. If everyone who bought in had a perfect grasp of the market for its products – optical transmitter modules and silicon photonics solutions, among others – that would be one thing.

But that is rarely how it works.

A company can have extraordinary potential, but you cannot set aside what is happening on the exchange at the same time. Least of all when senior insiders have chosen to sell shares. That they are taking advantage of a high valuation is understandable. But it sends a questionable signal. Do they not believe in this vast pipeline themselves?

The downside of a huge rally is that the momentum then has to be sustained for a long time. There needs to be a credible path – even one lying far into the future – to justifying what the market has put on the business. Otherwise it becomes difficult to hold shareholders’ attention. That is an unusual challenge. Most listed companies have never seen, and never will see, gains of several hundred percent in a matter of months.

Friday’s reaction on the exchange suggests Sivers Semiconductors will struggle with it. Whether the pipeline is accurate and will be realized is impossible to say.

But the company has a large problem right now, and that is coping with a share price which has priced in near-miraculous success in the relatively near term.

When the quarterly figures show the opposite, that becomes one more weight to carry.

And it takes time that management could have spent turning potential deals into real revenue.

Nvidia’s plan feels eerily familiar

August 26, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 26th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

Nvidia is not only innovative with its chips – the creativity now extends to the financial side as well. But acting as a bank for its customers, against collateral of uncertain value, carries an echo of the financial crisis.

If GB Glace had to lend children money so they could buy a Piggelin – wouldn’t that be something of a red flag?

Keep that analogy in mind when Nvidia reports its quarterly figures on Wednesday evening. Jensen Huang will talk about new chips and the enormous demand from customers. The company’s new financing arrangement will hardly be at the center of things.

But there is something odd here that sets off alarm bells.

If Silicon Valley has a history of being inventive with technology, New York has a matching reputation when it comes to finance. It is innovation of a different kind, but behind the scenes it underpins a great many corporate deals.

The chip maker Nvidia is now testing a blend of those two worlds. Innovative technical products with innovative funding. Together with some of the largest players in finance, it is offering its customers loans so they can invest more in chips and data centers.

Founder Jensen Huang has assembled a group featuring the biggest names in the industry – among them Apollo, Blackstone, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs.

Between them they have taken on one of the obstacles to the ongoing AI expansion: how customers are going to afford to keep it going. Together they have scraped together $500 billion to lend to new and existing buyers.

Costs are precisely what has been in focus for Nvidia lately. Sharp price increases on computer memory have made the servers used for AI computation more expensive. That is not Nvidia’s fault – but it becomes their problem. Both memory and their GPU chips are needed for the systems to work. That pushes up the total bill for anyone wanting to build a data center.

Nvidia could lower its own prices to compensate for the increase. But it obviously has no wish to. This is where the financing arrangement comes in. By offering cheaper credit, the total cost for customers comes down.

Everyone happy?

Unfortunately it is not quite that simple. Underpinning this arrangement is an unusual form of collateral.

When you borrow to buy a property, the building itself serves as security. If you cannot pay, the lender simply comes and takes it.

Data centers do include buildings, of course, but those are the cheap part in this category. What sits inside is what costs money.

So Nvidia and its financial partners are taking access to the chips as security for their loans. They regard computing power as an asset that can be borrowed against – an “investable infrastructure asset”, as Huang calls it. But is it really?

The assumption being made is that this computing power, like a property, has a more or less constant value. There will always be someone who wants it. Hopefully at roughly the same price. But given how AI has developed over the past few months, that is far from obvious.

The main threat comes from the east, where the Chinese AI models keep getting better. And more importantly – they are dramatically cheaper to use. Being open source means access is free and can spread rapidly among developers.

Large companies such as Thomson Reuters have built AI products based on a variant of Alibaba’s model Qwen, and Cursor – the coding tool SpaceX acquired – uses the Chinese model Kimi. The list goes on. Nvidia itself is now spending $6 billion to build a model of its own that can compete with these new Chinese players.

If AI development continues in this direction, it is possible that the amount of computing power in demand falls – or at least does not grow at the astronomical rate much of the industry expects. That in turn would leave the loans Nvidia and its partners are writing resting on shakier security.

Issuing large loans where the underlying collateral is weak is a story we have heard before. The great financial crisis of 2008 was built on exactly this. There it was home loans that could not be repaid, despite sounding like the most stable thing in the world. They were not. Least of all after financial innovation took off and created a mass of new assets with that decidedly unstable one at the bottom.

What Nvidia and its partners are doing is not exactly the same thing. But it sounds uncomfortably familiar.

TikTok’s new move could backfire

August 25, 2026
by Björn Jeffery
SvD Näringsliv

This analysis was first published in SvD Näringsliv, in Swedish, on August 25th, 2026. This piece was translated from Swedish by Claude. Some phrasing may differ from a human translation.

After the attack in Fagersta, attention has turned to TikTok’s darkest corners. The platform claims that almost everything inappropriate is caught before it is published – but the gaps are still wide. At the same time, TikTok is making a choice that risks making the problem worse.

It’s called algospeak – the words used on TikTok to avoid getting caught by the safety filters. By now they are so established that everyone knows what is meant.

“Unalive” instead of “kill,” “seggs” instead of “sex.” Everyone understands – except the filters themselves, which after several years of this still don’t seem to have caught up.

Getting around TikTok’s filters, in other words, requires no great linguistic effort. In the wake of last week’s attack in Fagersta, questions are once again being asked about whether there were signals the platforms could have picked up earlier.

But the question is how highly TikTok actually prioritizes fixing this.

As recently as July this year, the company told The Independent that 97 percent of all inappropriate material on the service was removed by automated systems. A full 99 percent disappeared before anyone had even reported it, according to the company.

That sounds impressive at first. But the context of the statement is less flattering: it came as an explanation for why TikTok was laying off 300 employees in Ireland who worked on precisely that – moderation and safety.

The people who presumably understand this best – the human moderators, whose job it is to review video clips – are not impressed.

An anonymous TikTok employee tells the paper that its AI systems get things wrong “all the time.” And it goes both ways – they miss material that should have been removed, and they take down posts that should have stayed up under the platform’s own rules. Holding up two fingers and a thumb is sometimes read by the AI as holding a gun. A human sees the difference in a second; the artificial intelligence is not always that smart when it comes to this particular thing.

In some cases, the glorification of violence and the celebration of murderers happens completely out in the open. In the Fagersta case, there is much to suggest that the suspected perpetrator took part in the TCC movement, True Crime Community. It is a loose grouping that venerates convicted killers and glorifies violent crime in general. According to information obtained by SvD, there are indications that he had several TikTok accounts suspended, only for them to reappear under near-identical names.

TCC is one of several violence-oriented groups that exist on TikTok and similar platforms. It connects people who would otherwise be alone with these interests, and can contribute to radicalization. Crimes of this kind are usually committed by individuals, but those individuals belong to a wider setting that lives online.

The column inches now being devoted to TCC say something about how visible the movement is – this is no hidden subculture that requires special knowledge to find. It sits in the open on TikTok. And still the platform cannot keep it out.

That young people gravitate toward services like TikTok is well documented. Much of the debate – in Sweden too – has therefore been about stopping them from getting there in the first place. Minister for Social Affairs Jakob Forssmed (KD) has talked about an age limit for social media in Sweden, a question now under official review.

Australia has gone furthest, becoming the first country in the world to ban social media for minors. But new figures show that the share of 13- to 15-year-olds using TikTok there is now just one percentage point lower than before the ban took effect. The prohibition has not solved the root problem, at least not yet. The underlying drive – to find like-minded people on the internet – remains.

TikTok cannot be held responsible for everything its users do. But it is equally wrong to describe these perpetrators as individuals acting in a vacuum. They are part of a milieu that celebrates brutality and urges its members to commit terrible acts. We know this. And TikTok knows it too.

Knowing that movements organize and plan attacks on your own platform ought to carry a substantial responsibility. TikTok’s head of communications in the Nordics told Expressen that “violence and violent extremism have no place on TikTok.” Yet the company is cutting hundreds of moderators and letting automated systems take over more of the work. There are clearly large holes in those safety filters – and they now risk getting worse.

We are long past the point where TikTok can plead ignorance. This can, unfortunately, happen again.