Sriram Krishnan is a technology executive and investor who served as Senior White House Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence in the second Trump administration from January 2025 until the end of June 2026. President-elect Donald Trump announced the appointment on December 22, 2024 (Source: en.wikipedia.org). Before joining the White House, Krishnan was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and held product roles at Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Meta, and Snap (Source: techcrunch.com).
White House role
Krishnan worked alongside AI and crypto czar David Sacks, whom he has described as his closest collaborator over his eighteen months in the role. He cited the administration's AI Action Plan — which prioritized data-center construction over regulation — as a key accomplishment of his tenure (Source: techcrunch.com). His tenure spanned the administration's 2025–26 executive actions on AI, including the June 2, 2026 cyber/frontier executive order (EO — Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security (Trump, signed June 2, 2026)) and the June 5, 2026 national-security memorandum NSPM-11 (NSPM-11 — Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise (Trump, June 5, 2026)).
Departure
Krishnan announced on June 6, 2026, in a post on X, that he would leave the post at the end of June. He said he would next be "building institutions" to address challenges for "America and its allies"; the Washington Post reported that he plans to start an outside organization that would continue to shape the administration's AI policy from outside government (Source: washingtonpost.com). His exit followed the June 2 executive order and the June 5 reports of OpenAI government-equity-stake discussions (Source: techcrunch.com).
In his first in-depth interview since leaving the administration, published July 3, 2026 in the Financial Times, Krishnan said "there will not be an FDA for AI" under Trump, ruling out a centralized frontier-model regulator, and blamed the AI backlash on the industry's "doomer" messaging (Source: ft.com). See AI Pre-Release Vetting.
Relationships
- related: David Sacks — closest White House collaborator
- related: America's AI Action Plan — cited as key accomplishment
- related: EO — Promoting Advanced AI Innovation and Security (Trump, signed June 2, 2026), NSPM-11 — Artificial Intelligence in the National Security Enterprise (Trump, June 5, 2026) — executive actions during his tenure
- related: Federal AI Adoption — Patterns and Tensions — administration AI-policy context