David Sachs has used his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar.
Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor and podcaster confirmed that his 130-consecutive-day term as a special government employee has ended and that he is moving to co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) with White House senior technology adviser Michael Kratsios.
“I think moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations on an expanded range of technology topics, not just AI,” he told Bloomberg via a video interview. “So yes, that’s how I’ll be involved moving forward.”
What this means in practice is that Sachs will be far from the center of power in Washington since the beginning of this second Trump administration. As AI czar, Sachs had direct contact with Trump and had a hand in shaping policy. PCAST is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, prepares reports, and sends recommendations up the chain, it does not make policy.
The council has existed in some form or another since FDR, though Sachs notes to Bloomberg that this particular iteration has “by far the most star power of any such group,” 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-founders Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, AMD’s Lisa Su and Michael Dell. (That’s a lot of billionaires.)
Sachs told Bloomberg that the council will work on AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear energy, and in the near future the focus will shift toward advancing Trump’s national AI framework, which was released just last week. The framework is intended to replace what Sachs described to Bloomberg as a jumble of conflicting state-level rules. “You have 50 different states that are regulating it in 50 different ways,” he said, “and it’s creating a web of regulation that is difficult for our innovators to follow.”
Sachs did not directly address why the change was happening now or whether his recent comments were a factor. Earlier this month, on the popular “All In” podcast he co-hosts, Sachs publicly urged the administration to pull out of the U.S.-backed war with Iran, going through a set 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 Sachs had not talked to him about the war. (The US-Israel war over Iran has been going on for about 27 days now.)
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Asked by Bloomberg about the podcast episode on Thursday, Sachs metaphorically 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 represent his personal view, not an official one.
For all the major names Sachs is bringing to PCAST, it’s worth considering what the council has historically been, which is an advisory body that has some influence in some administrations and almost none in others.
President Obama’s version appears to be the most productive on record, churning out 36 reports over eight years—two of which resulted in substantive policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened the market to over-the-counter hearing aids.
In contrast, President Trump’s first council took nearly three years to name its first members, produced a handful of reports and made little to no impact, while President Biden’s council leaned heavily academic – Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, members of the National Academy – and released a modest number of reports before the administration ended.
The current PCAST is an entirely different creature, composed almost entirely of the executive suites of the companies that are shaping the technology on which it will advise.
Now, Sachs is again one of those unencumbered executives, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokesperson for Craft Ventures, the company Sachs co-founded and where he remains a partner, has not yet responded to related questions about next steps; TechCrunch last year reported on the ethics waivers it received for maintaining 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.
