David Sacks has spent his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
In a conversation 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 is moving on to co-chair the President’s Council on Science and Technology (PCAST) with White House senior technology adviser Michael Kratsios.
“I think that 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 video interview. “So yes, that’s how I want to help move forward.”
What this means in practice is that Sacks will be much further from the center of power in Washington than since the beginning 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 does not make policy.
The council has been around in one form or another since FDR, though Sacks made a point to Bloomberg noting that this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue that he’s wrong. The first 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 AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear power, and that near-term attention will shift to pushing Trump’s national AI framework, released last week. The framework is aimed at replacing 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 regulation that is difficult for our innovators to comply with.”
What Sacks didn’t directly address 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, going through a series of worsening scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, 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 had not spoken to him about the war. (The US-Israel war against Iran has now been going on for approximately 27 days.)
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Asked about the podcast episode 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 brings to PCAST, it’s worth reflecting on 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 apparently the most prolific ever, issuing 36 reports over eight years — two of which led to concrete policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened up the market for over-the-counter hearing aids.
By contrast, President Trump’s first term took nearly three years to simply name its first members, produced a handful of reports and made little impact, while President Biden’s council skewed heavily academic — Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, members of the National Academy — and issued a modest number of reports before the administration ended.
The current PCAST ​​is a completely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of the companies that shape the technology it will advise on.
Now Sacks is once again one of the unencumbered executives, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokesman for Craft Ventures, the firm 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 AI and crypto companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — an arrangement that drew sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.