David Sacks, the venture capitalist and tech billionaire who\u2019d become Silicon Valley\u2019s primary advocate inside the White House and a key architect of its aggressive AI policy initiatives, revealed on Thursday that he was no longer a special government employee \u2014 and therefore no longer President Donald Trump\u2019s Special Advisor on AI and Crypto.<\/p>\n
Sacks\u2019 official status as an SGE allowed him to work simultaneously in the private sector and for the government, but for no more than 130 days, raising questions about why he was still in the job more than a year after his appointment. But in an interview with Bloomberg Television<\/a> discussing the White House\u2019s recent legislative proposal for an AI framework, Sacks revealed that he had now \u201cused up that time,\u201d and would now focus his energy on co-chairing the President\u2019s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).<\/p>\n Earlier this week, the White House had announced several new appointments to the advisory council<\/a>, including other tech executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreessen, Jensen Huang, and Sergey Brin. Michael Kratsios, the head of the White House\u2019s Office of Science and Technology Policy, will also be co-chair.<\/p>\n \u201cI think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on not just AI, but on an expanded range of technology topics,\u201d he told interviewer Ed Ludlow. When asked, Sacks clarified that his role would not involve coordinating with the government of federal agencies: \u201cIt\u2019s intended to be advice to the president and to the White House, to the executive offices of the president. So, yeah, we\u2019re going to study issues, make recommendations. And that\u2019s the main goal of that, is advice.\u201d (The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.)<\/p>\n As AI and crypto czar, Sacks, who had held a major Silicon Valley fundraiser for Trump in 2024, had direct access to the Oval Office and wielded immense power in shaping the White House\u2019s technology policy. But his aggressive approach to policymaking inadvertently he steered the Trump administration into several unpopular political battles. His attempt to implement a blanket ban on AI state laws, both in Congress<\/a> and then by executive order<\/a>, alienated Republican governors and MAGA populists instead, and made several other potential policy wins politically toxic. \u201cHe failed to get preemption. He pressed the White House into a culture war against its own voters. He kept it from getting simple wins like child safety. He has been a political disaster,\u201d Michael Toscano, the executive director for the conservative Institute for Family Studies, told The Verge. \u201cHe is perhaps singularly responsible for the White House losing its populist bona fides.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"David Sacks, the venture capitalist and tech billionaire who\u2019d become Silicon Valley\u2019s primary advocate inside the White House…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":547621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[182,28,13408,1343,111,172],"class_list":["post-547620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-ai","tag-business","tag-crypto","tag-policy","tag-politics","tag-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/547621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}