David Sacks has used up his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster, confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government employee is over and that he’s moving on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside senior White House technology adviser Michael Kratsios.
“I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on not just AI but an expanded range of technology topics,” he told Bloomberg via a video interview. “So yes, this is how I’ll be involved moving forward.”
What that means in practice is Sacks will be much further from power center in Washington than since the outset of this second Trump administration. As AI czar, Sacks had a direct line to Trump and a hand in shaping policy. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, produces reports, and sends recommendations up the chain, it doesn’t make policy.
The council has existed in some form since FDR, though Sacks made a point to Bloomberg of noting 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 the council will take up AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing, and nuclear power, and that near-term attention will go toward pushing Trump’s national AI framework, released just last week. The framework is aimed at replacing what Sacks described to Bloomberg as a mess of conflicting state-level rules. “You’ve got 50 different states regulating this in 50 different ways,” he said, “and it’s creating a patchwork of regulation that’s difficult for our innovators to comply with.”
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What Sacks 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 that he co-hosts, Sacks publicly urged the administration to find an exit from the U.S.-backed war with Iran, walking through a set of worsening scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, the destruction of desalination plants, the possibility of nuclear use by Israel — and calling for a polite way out. Trump responded by telling reporters that Sacks hadn’t spoken to him about the war.
Asked about it Thursday by Bloomberg, Sacks figuratively threw his hands in the air: “I’m not on the foreign policy team or the national security team,” he said, adding that his podcast comments represented his personal view, not an official one.
For all the marquee names Sacks is bringing to PCAST, it’s worth reflecting on what the council has historically been, which is an advisory body with real influence in some administrations and almost none in others.
President Obama’s version was seemingly the most productive on record, churning out 36 reports over eight years — two of which led to concrete policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened the market for over-the-counter hearing aids.
President Trump’s first-term council, by contrast, took nearly three years just to name its first members, produced a handful of reports, and made no particular mark, while President Biden’s council skewed heavily academic — Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, National Academy members — and issued a modest number of reports before the administration ended.
The current PCAST is a completely different animal, composed almost entirely of active CEOs and investors building the tech with which the U.S. hopes to dominate the world.
Now, Sacks is one of them again and likely free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokeswoman for Craft Ventures, the firm Sacks co-founded and where he remains a partner, has not yet responded to related questions, but TechCrunch reported last year on the ethics waivers Sacks obtained to maintain financial stakes in AI and crypto companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — an arrangement that drew sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.
