Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
David Sacks outweighs the labs' catastrophe warnings in Trump's AI policy
The venture capitalist David Sacks, now an outside adviser, is the loudest anti-regulation voice reaching Trump. For anyone budgeting compliance spend, the federal outlook moves with his access to the president.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Heads of leading AI companies warned last weekend that runaway AI development could be catastrophic, and Vox reported that momentum for regulatory action from Washington briefly seemed to build.
- In Truth Social posts on Monday, Trump called AI the greatest economic development engine in history, said the US had to win against China, and dismissed fears it would destroy the world as a hoax.
- Venture capitalist David Sacks has become the leading voice against many proposals for government action, on his podcast, in media appearances and in private advice to the president.
- The Washington Post reported in May that a phone call from Sacks to Trump temporarily derailed the planned signing of an executive order on AI.
- Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have reportedly pressed to set up a government body that could oversee the industry and address AI hacking risks.
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A compliance budget cannot be sized against a docket when the deciding forum is a private conversation: there is no published text to cost and no comment window to work in.
- exposure Chip exporters' permission to sell abroad rides on one adviser's standing with the president, so a change in who advises Trump can move their addressable market faster than any rulemaking would.
- contradiction The labs warning about catastrophe and the adviser Trump listens to want different versions of the industry, so what looks like an argument about safety is also an argument about whether open weight or proprietary models win.
- decision A firm holding compliance spend until a federal overseer defines the perimeter is betting on an option the president has declined so far.
When policy is set through access instead of rulemaking, the difference shows up on a budget calendar. A proposed rule has a docket and a comment period. You can read it before you spend against it. Sacks stepped down as the White House artificial intelligence and crypto czar in March [6]. The phone call the Washington Post reported came roughly two months after he left that job [1].
When Politico asked this week about Trump's newly vocal hostility to AI safety, a senior White House official said: "David Sacks. It's all coming from him." [4] Vox reported that administration policy is often shaped by who has the president's ear more than by an agency process [17]. Sacks declined to comment to Vox [9].
Trump has so far rejected the oversight approach and stayed much closer to the Sacks position [11].
The opposition to safety rules is divided, and the split matters for anyone modelling what a future rule would actually cover. Sacks is at odds with OpenAI and Anthropic; he and other influential Silicon Valley figures back open weight AI over proprietary secret models [13]. The case against open weight AI is that it carries serious safety and national security risks, and that the leading open weight models are Chinese; the case for it is that it beats concentrating superintelligence in two companies' hands [14].
The exposure that moves this quarter is export permission. Trump's willingness to allow AI chip sales abroad, including to China, is in part due to Sacks's influence [15]. The same influence can withdraw it. Whether frontier developers face federal oversight at all runs on a timescale longer than a year.
The Vox account covers Washington and does not describe what state legislatures are doing, so a compliance plan built on a state-by-state patchwork rests on evidence outside this record. The federal record supports something narrower: direction can change in one conversation, and Sacks still co-chairs a presidential technology board [7].
What to watch
- Whether the oversight body Bessent and Wiles are said to want is created, and who is put in charge of it.
- Whether the AI executive order stalled in May is signed, and whether its text changes before it is.
- Whether the presidential technology board Sacks co-chairs becomes the formal channel for AI policy.