David Sachs is done with his days as Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and crypto czar.
Speaking to Bloomberg On Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor and podcaster confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government official is over and that he is moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) with White House senior technology adviser Michael Kratsios.
“I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations not just on artificial intelligence, but on a broader range of technology issues,” he told Bloomberg via video interview. “Well yeah, that’s how I’ll be involved moving forward.”
What this means in practice is that Sachs will be much further from the center of power in Washington than he was at the start of this second Trump administration. As the AI czar, Sachs had a direct line to Trump and helped shape policy. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, produces reports and sends recommendations up the chain, it does not make policy.
The council has been around in some form since FDR, though Sachs pointed out to Bloomberg that this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue he’s wrong. The initial 15 members include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, AMD’s Lisa Su and Michael Dell, among others. (That’s a lot of billionaires.)
Sacks told Bloomberg that the council will address artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear power, and that the near-term focus will be on advancing Trump’s national AI framework, which was released just last week. The framework aims to replace what Sacks described to Bloomberg as a mess of conflicting rules at the state level. “You have 50 different states regulating this in 50 different ways,” he said, “and it creates a patchwork of regulations that are difficult for our innovators to comply with.”
What Sachs didn’t address head-on was why the transition is happening now and whether his recent comments were a factor. Earlier this month, on the popular “All In” podcast he co-hosts, Sacks publicly urged the administration to find a way out of the U.S.-backed war with Iran, running through a series of worsening scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, the destruction of desalination plants, the possibility of Israel’s polite use of nuclear power. Trump responded by telling reporters that Sachs she hadn’t spoken to him for the war. (The US-Israel war in Iran has now been going on for about 27 days.)
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Asked about the podcast episode Thursday by Bloomberg, Sacks metaphorically threw his hands in the air: “I’m not on the foreign policy team or the national security team,” he said, adding that his comments on the podcast represented his personal opinion, not an official one.
For all the names Sacks brings to PCAST, it’s worth considering what the council has historically been, which is an advisory body with some influence in some administrations and almost none in others.
President Obama’s version was apparently the most prolific on record, racking up 36 petitions over eight years — two of which led to specific policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened the market to over-the-counter hearing aids.
By contrast, President Trump’s first-year council took nearly three years to name its first members, produced a handful of reports and failed to make much of a mark, while President Biden’s council drew heavily on academics — Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, National Academy members — and issued a small number of reports before the administration ended.
The current PCAST is an entirely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of the companies shaping the technology it will advise on.
Now, Sachs is one of those unfettered executives again, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A representative for Craft Ventures, the company Sacks co-founded and where he remains a partner, has yet to respond to related questions about next steps. TechCrunch reported last year on the ethics waivers Sacks obtained to maintain financial stakes in artificial intelligence and crypto companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — an arrangement that drew sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.
