David Sacks spent his days as Donald Trump’s AI and cryptocurrency czar.
who spoke to Bloomberg On Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor and podcaster confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day stint as a special government employee has ended and that he will continue to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) with White House Chief Technology Advisor Michael Kratsios.
“I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on a wide range of technology topics, not just artificial intelligence,” he told Bloomberg during a video interview. “So, yeah, moving forward, that’s how I’ll be involved.”
In practice, this means Sacks will be far from the center of power in Washington since the start of this second Trump administration. As the AI czar, Sacks had a direct relationship with Trump and had a hand in shaping policy. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so it doesn’t make policy when it investigates issues, prepares reports, and sends chain recommendations.
The council has been around in some form since FDR, though Sacks noted to Bloomberg that this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like it” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue that it’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 deal with artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear power, and the near-term focus will be on improving Trump’s national artificial intelligence framework released last week. The framework aims to replace what Sacks described to Bloomberg as a jumble of conflicting state-level regulations. “You have 50 different states regulating it in 50 different ways,” he said, “and that creates a regulatory system that’s difficult for us innovators.”
What Sacks didn’t directly address was why the transition is happening now and whether his recent comments were a factor. On the popular All In podcast he co-hosted earlier this month, Sacks publicly urged the administration to find a way out of a U.S.-backed war with Iran, using a series of worst-case scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, the destruction of desalination plants, Israel’s ability to use nuclear weapons and political tactics. Trump responded by calling Sacks to reporters he had not spoken to her about the war. (The US-Israeli war against Iran has been going on for about 27 days now.)
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Asked by Bloomberg about Thursday’s podcast episode, Sacks figuratively threw up his hands: “I’m not on the foreign policy team or the national security team,” he said, adding that his podcast comments represented his personal, not official, view.
For all the marquee names Sacks brings to PCAST, it’s worth considering what the council has historically been, an advisory body with some influence in some administrations and almost none in others.
President Obama’s version was the most prolific, producing 36 reports over eight years — two of which led to specific policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened up the market for over-the-counter hearing aids.
President Trump’s first-term council, by contrast, took nearly three years to name its first members, produced a handful of reports and left no particular mark, while President Biden’s council grossly misrepresented academics — Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, members of the National Academy — and produced a modest number of reports until the end of the administration.
The current PCAST is an entirely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of the companies that shape the technology it will advise.
Now, Sacks is one of those freelancers who is free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokeswoman for Craft Ventures, which Sacks co-founded and remains a partner in, has yet to respond to questions about next steps; TechCrunch reported on this last year Sacks has gotten to keep financial stakes in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — drawing sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.
