David Sacks has spent his days as Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar.
Speaking with Bloomberg On Thursday, the veteran entrepreneur, investor and podcaster confirmed that his 130-day non-consecutive stint as a special government employee has ended and that he will move on to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside White House senior technology advisor Michael Kratsios.
“I think as I move forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations not only on AI, but also on a broader range of technology topics,” he told Bloomberg via video interview. “So yeah, that’s how I’ll be involved in the future.”
What that means in practice is that Sacks will be much further from the center of power in Washington than he has been since the beginning of this second Trump administration. As AI czar, Sacks had a direct line to Trump and was involved in policymaking. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, produces reports, and sends recommendations down the chain, it does not make policy.
The council has existed in some form since Roosevelt, although Sacks noted to Bloomberg that this particular iteration has “the greatest star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue that 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.
There are many billionaires.
Sacks told Bloomberg that the council will address AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear energy, and that the near-term focus will be on boosting Trump’s national AI framework, released last week. The framework is intended to replace what Sacks described to Bloomberg as a mess of conflicting rules at the state level. “There are 50 different states regulating this in 50 different ways,” he said, “and it’s creating a patchwork of regulations that is 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 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, destruction of desalination plants, the possibility of nuclear use by Israel) and calling for a polite exit. Trump responded by telling reporters that Sacks I hadn’t spoken to him about the war.
When asked about it by Bloomberg on Thursday, Sacks figuratively threw up his hands: “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, not official, views.
For all the big 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 apparently the most productive ever recorded, producing 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 left no particular mark, while President Biden’s council had a markedly academic bias (Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, members of the National Academy) and issued a modest number of reports before the administration ended.
Today’s PCAST is a completely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of companies that shape the technology it will advise on.
Now, Sacks is one of them again and is likely free to resume his life as an investor and businessman. A spokeswoman for Craft Ventures, the firm Sacks co-founded and remains a partner at, has not yet responded to related questions, but TechCrunch reported. last year over the ethics exemptions Sacks obtained to maintain financial stakes in artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency companies while also shaping federal policy in both areas, an arrangement that drew harsh criticism from ethicists and lawmakers.
