David Sacks is a Silicon Valley venture capitalist serving as Special Advisor to the President for AI and Crypto ("AI & Crypto Czar") in the White House since 2025, a newly created role responsible for coordinating AI and digital-asset policy across federal agencies. In the second Trump administration he is associated with a deregulatory, pro-acceleration AI posture and is reported to be a principal internal author of the administration's main AI executive actions.
| Role | Special Advisor to the President for AI and Crypto ("AI & Crypto Czar"), White House (2025–present) |
| Background | General partner, Craft Ventures; former COO of PayPal (part of the "PayPal Mafia"); former CEO of Yammer; co-host of the All-In Podcast |
Background
Sacks is a venture capitalist and longtime commentator on technology and politics. Before his White House role he was a general partner at Craft Ventures, former chief operating officer of PayPal (described as part of the "PayPal Mafia"), former chief executive of Yammer, and a co-host of the All-In Podcast. In December 2024, President-elect Trump announced that Sacks would serve as the administration's first AI & Crypto Czar.
Roles and policy coordination
Sacks is reported to be a principal internal author and coordinator of Executive Order 14365 ("Removing Barriers to American Leadership in AI") and the follow-on America's AI Action Plan. Both prioritize compute buildout, export promotion, federal preemption of state-level AI regulation, and pushback against what the administration characterizes as "woke" or "biased" AI systems.
Sacks operates as a channel between Silicon Valley networks (particularly the Thiel, Andreessen, and Founders Fund network) and the Trump White House. His appointment indicated that the administration's AI posture would be set by industry-aligned accelerationists rather than by national-security hawks of the Biden variety or restrictionists of the first Trump term.
Positions
Sacks has stated positions across several areas of AI policy:
- Deregulation: favors removing federal and state regulatory barriers to AI development and deployment, consistent with his broader venture-capital-aligned worldview.
- Competition with China: supports export controls on advanced compute to China while opposing domestic capability constraints on US developers.
- AI safety framings: publicly critical of what he describes as "doomer" framings, and has characterized the AI safety movement as conflating speculative long-term risks with present policy.
- Acceleration: favors accelerating private-sector frontier capability development as a national-security priority.
His positions place him as an executive-branch expression of the AI-race frame (AI Race Dynamics). He has publicly criticized the Biden-era AI regulatory architecture and supported its rescission (Joe Biden).
Interventions and statements
Intervention on the cybersecurity-and-frontier-AI EO
On May 21, 2026, Sacks made a phone call that led President Trump to postpone signing a planned executive order on cybersecurity and frontier AI. Sacks warned that the order's provision for voluntary government testing of AI models could become a slippery slope toward mandatory regulation, slowing US firms relative to Chinese rivals; he treated the voluntary government-testing mechanism as a regulatory foothold. The postponed order is the planned EO on AI lab–government cybersecurity information-sharing covered under AI cybersecurity; Sacks's objection isolated the model-evaluation component as the specific sticking point. (Sources: https://www.axios.com/2026/05/21/trump-ai-executive-order-postponed-why ; https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/david-sacks-trump-ai-executive-order-6019242d)
Response to Pope Leo XIV's encyclical
On May 26, 2026, Sacks publicly responded to Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica humanitas by warning against giving governments "sweeping power" over AI, framing the encyclical's call for "robust legal frameworks" and independent oversight as a step toward government "domination" of the technology. The response was the first public response by a senior US government AI official to a papal document on AI, and operated on the same deregulatory premise as the EO intervention five days earlier. (Source: insideaipolicy.com) See Pope Leo XIV.
Statement on AI and jobs
In accounts published July 3, 2026, Sacks cited a study from business-technology firm Ramp to argue that AI is creating rather than destroying jobs, countering what he characterized as the prevailing narrative around AI-driven job losses (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See AI Labor Disruption.
Statement on Mythos-driven security
On June 22, 2026, Sacks said he had focused extensively on the security challenges tied to Anthropic's Mythos model and argued that AI companies and the federal government must partner to address cyber vulnerabilities before adversaries exploit them; he also sought to "correct" the narrative around his earlier critique of Anthropic. The remarks situated his deregulatory posture alongside a cybersecurity-cooperation framing, against the backdrop of the export-control directive that had forced Anthropic to cut foreign access to Mythos and Fable 5 (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Anthropic, Anthropic v. United States (Pentagon ban challenge).
Statement on Chinese open-weight advances (July 2026)
In remarks published July 20, 2026, Sacks said the U.S. must halt a shift toward restrictions on data centers and controls on advanced AI rollout, citing reports that Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 matches or exceeds some capabilities of the best American models and reiterating his "permissionless innovation" framing (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Open-Weight Frontier Models, Data Center Siting / AI Power Politics.
The position put Sacks publicly at odds with parts of his own administration as some officials revived work toward de facto bans on Chinese open models: rebutting OpenAI strategic-futures head Dean Ball's July 19 suggestion that the government create "regulatory risk" around Chinese open-weight models, Sacks wrote that "The leading closed labs... want the government to eliminate their open source competition" (Source: washingtonpost.com; axios.com).
Criticism of New York's data-center moratorium (July 2026)
On July 20, 2026, Sacks charged that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul's statewide pause on new hyperscale data-center permitting rests on a "false accusation" against AI facilities, escalating White House criticism of the state-imposed moratorium as Hochul defended it as a one-year window to set "rules of the road" (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See New York Data-Center Moratorium (2026).
Sources
- Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI and source summary
- America's AI Action Plan and source summary
- Washington Post brief on "radical activists" and AI safety
Relationships
- related: Donald Trump — principal AI adviser.
- related: Executive Order 14365 — Ensuring a National Policy Framework for AI — reported principal internal author.
- related: America's AI Action Plan — coordinator.
- related: Michael Kratsios, JD Vance — peer second-term AI policy leadership.
- contradicts: Joe Biden — Sacks has publicly criticized the Biden-era AI regulatory architecture and supported its rescission.
- instance-of: AI Race Dynamics — Sacks is an executive-branch expression of the race frame.