Trump’s AI policy is increasingly a bet on David Sacks

The policy follows the adviser

Sacks argues that regulation would destroy the United States’ lead in the global AI race. At the White House, he has been treated as Trump’s principal adviser on the technology, repeatedly urging the president to soften rules and backing executive orders and other measures aimed at removing restrictions. He has also invested directly in several AI companies.

The alignment has produced a clear policy sequence:

This week, Trump called Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang to discuss AI regulation while Huang was appearing onstage with Sacks. Next week, Trump will host Chinese President Xi Jinping at the White House, with several AI executives expected to attend. NBC News reported that Sacks would be among the guests.

Isabelle Sunderland, head of technology reform policy at the nonprofit Issue One, said the relationship showed how money can provide direct access to power. She argued that Trump’s AI adviser demonstrated that the US political system serves wealthy and influential people rather than ordinary Americans. In her view, the issue is not only who regulates AI, but who gets to write the rules.

The panic that sharpened the split

Trump’s latest attack on AI regulation followed a post by Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic employee who said last week that he was leaving the company. Coxon wrote that AI would soon become a “superhuman system” capable of causing human extinction by 2030.

Other Anthropic employees endorsed similar predictions. One said the company genuinely believed AI could kill everyone.

The warnings triggered a burst of media coverage and political reaction over the past two weeks. US politicians, national leaders and international organizations called for limits on the technology. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei proposed slowing AI development and using regulation to protect the public.

The industry’s unusually broad show of agreement included:

Sacks took the opposite view. He called Amodei’s proposal an “electoral psychological operation” and an attempt to capture regulation for the industry’s benefit. He also dismissed independent AI evaluations as “pseudoscience,” “censorship” and “control.”

In a longer social-media post responding to Amodei, Sacks said that if unreleased models were so frightening that Anthropic wanted to slow development, he supported that responsible decision. But Anthropic, he argued, should not pretend it needed anyone’s permission to do so.

His broader argument is that public fear has already been used to justify institutions he does not trust. Sacks pointed to the media panics around Russiagate and COVID-19, saying they led social platforms to create trust and safety departments that censored conservative and dissenting voices. He said those groups had not earned public trust and that their purpose was not connected to public safety.

The adviser behind the appointment

Sacks and Trump’s relationship predates the White House. Sacks was born in Cape Town in 1972 and moved to the United States with his family in the late 1970s. At Stanford, he studied economics, met Peter Thiel and worked with him at the conservative student newspaper Stanford Review.

The pair later co-wrote The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and the Politics of Intolerance at Stanford, published in 1995. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Sacks, Thiel, Musk and others worked at PayPal, later becoming part of the wealthy technology network known as the “PayPal mafia.”

In 2017, Sacks co-founded Craft Ventures. The fund raised hundreds of millions of dollars for technology companies and invested in:

In 2023, Sacks said the fund had $3.3 billion in assets under management. Around the same period, he became more active in politics. He had donated to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, but soon shifted primarily toward Republican candidates and causes.

In March 2020, he launched All-In, a popular and influential technology podcast with three other conservative Silicon Valley investors. Vanity Fair described the podcast’s annual summit in 2025 as a capitalist gathering for like-minded people, where attendees could set aside criticism of “progressive ideology” and enter “founder mode.”

Campaign finance records show that Sacks donated to J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, Ron DeSantis and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In June 2024, he hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his $45 million French limestone mansion in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights. A ticket for a couple cost $500,000.

After Trump won the election, he appointed Sacks as his AI and crypto czar in a role created specifically for him. As a “special government employee,” Sacks could work in the administration for no more than 130 days a year. He did not need Senate confirmation hearings or to disclose his finances, although the Office of Government Ethics required Craft Ventures to sell some of its holdings in AI companies.

The cost of keeping Sacks close

Sacks announced in March that he was leaving the administration, but his access to Trump did not end. In May, he persuaded the president to abandon an executive order that would have placed AI models under government control. In July, the two held the Washington AI summit together.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Sacks’s influence irritated other senior administration officials. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were concerned about the consequences of AI for the country and advised Trump to strengthen oversight. Trump nevertheless continued to side with Sacks.

That position may be less representative of Republican voters than of the technology investors surrounding the administration. A May poll by Bryson Gillette Insights for the AI safety organization Future of Life Institute found that 85% of Republicans supported strong action by Trump to ensure the safe development and deployment of AI.

My read is that the interesting failure here is not simply that Sacks opposes regulation. It is that the administration has treated his worldview as a governing shortcut: warnings become panic, oversight becomes censorship, and industry access becomes evidence of expertise. The policy may still be defended as a strategy for preserving US leadership, but the political coalition behind it is narrower than the rhetoric suggests.

Sasha Howarth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, called Sacks’s AI strategy “possibly the biggest miscalculation” of the Trump administration. He described Sacks as an out-of-touch Silicon Valley radical who wanted to replace people with machines, and argued that appointing him would inevitably carry a political cost. Howarth said Republicans were following major technology executives “straight off a cliff.”

What remains quiet in the announcement is how conflicts of interest should be judged when the adviser shaping AI policy has invested in AI companies, when his fund has been required to sell some of those assets, and when he retains direct access after leaving government. Sacks and the White House did not respond to requests for comment. The unresolved tension is not only whether AI needs stricter rules, but whether the rules are being written by public institutions or by the investors closest to them.