As the heads of leading artificial intelligence companies came together last weekend to warn that runaway AI development could lead to catastrophic outcomes, momentum briefly seemed to be building for regulatory action from Washington.

But one connected and influential tech industry figure has become the leading voice opposing many proposals for government action — on his podcast, in media appearances, and in his private advice to President Donald Trump, who now calls AI doomsday fears a “hoax.”

David Sacks is a venture capitalist and part of the “PayPal Mafia” who, in recent years, has exemplified the rightward shift of some in the tech sector. He advised Elon Musk on his takeover of Twitter in 2022, and regularly unleashes a stream of scornful commentary about Democrats on social media and on the podcast All-In, which he co-hosts with three other venture capitalists. 

And for anyone wondering why Trump seems so newly dug-in against AI safety warnings — and against government action that might slow down the runaway technology before people might get hurt — Sacks is right at the center of the conversation. When Politico asked this week about Trump’s newly vocal hostility to AI safety, a senior White House official said: “David Sacks. It’s all coming from him.”

Yet Sacks’s role in the debate is an unusual one. Though he champions the AI industry, he’s no fan of the US’s two biggest AI companies. In his years in the tech industry, he’s made powerful allies, as well as many enemies — technology investor Paul Graham once posted that Sacks may be “the most evil person in Silicon Valley” (in response, Sacks called him a bully and made insinuations of antisemitism). His role, and ideology, are a window into how complex the politics and geopolitical stakes of the AI race really are — as well as how Trump administration policy is often shaped less by agency policy processes than by who has the president’s ear.

After endorsing and fundraising for Trump in 2024 — “I love David’s house, what a house,” Trump said after a fundraiser at Sacks’s $20 million San Francisco mansion) — Sacks was rewarded with a job as the White House’s “artificial intelligence and crypto czar.” There, he helped steer policy until stepping down this past March. He still co-chairs a presidential technology board, and his influence persists — in May, the Washington Post reported that a phone call from Sacks to Trump temporarily derailed the planned signing of an executive order on AI. (Vox reached out to Sacks for this article, but he declined to comment.)

Sacks is not the only Trump adviser thinking about AI: Other top administration officials, like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles have reportedly been more concerned about the risks of new AI tools for hacking, and have been trying to establish a government body that could help oversee the industry and address these risks.

But, so far, Trump has rejected this approach, and stayed much closer to the Sacks position. In a flurry of Truth Social posts Monday, he argued that AI would be “the Greatest Economic Development Engine in History,” said that the US had to “win” against China in the AI race, and dismissed concerns AI would “destroy the World” as a “hoax.”

To understand the implications of Sacks’s influence, you have to understand his position in the Silicon Valley AI ecosystem. In conversations with AI policy insiders, it becomes clear that many view his position through the lens of both his history as a tech investor, as well as his sharp-elbowed and take-no-prisoners style.

The split he embodies isn’t just about AI safety, but a fundamental divide over which business model of AI should succeed — one that pits Sacks directly against the biggest AI companies driving the safety debate.

Sacks is pro-AI — but he’s at odds with Anthropic and OpenAI

Sacks has generally been opposed to new regulation of AI companies by the government. His preferred approach, he’s frequently said, is to “let them cook.” He wants to let tech companies march ahead, and argues that government intervention would squelch innovation. “It’s this very libertarian approach to America winning in AI,” said Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations who worked on tech policy for President Joe Biden’s National Security Council, of Sacks’s approach.

That puts Sacks in opposition to AI safety advocates, who argue that regulation is necessary to rein in an increasingly dangerous technology. Indeed, even the leading AI company CEOs — Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and even Sacks’s friend Elon Musk — have called for a slowdown in advanced AI development because of these dangers.

But Sacks has tended to dismiss warnings such as that of former Anthropic employee Jacob Coxon as “doomer histrionics.” Of late, he’s also argued that if Anthropic and OpenAI are worried that their products are dangerous, that’s on them. “If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible,” Sacks posted on X on Saturday. 

Indeed, though Sacks is often shorthanded as pro-AI, he’s in some key ways been quite critical of the leading AI labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, themselves.

That’s partly because he’s aligned with a different faction in Silicon Valley. Sacks and key allies like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg want much more AI development from many more places, by way of models that are “open weight” or “open source.” These models make their parameters (“weights”) publicly available, in contrast to the flagship proprietary models of OpenAI and Anthropic. 

“Keeping innovation decentralized and accessible is the key to avoiding an unsafe and dystopian future where advanced AI capabilities are centralized and controlled by only a few hands,” Sacks posted on X earlier month. He has accused companies like Anthropic of trying to “kneecap open source” with regulation.

Proponents of open models hope advanced AI becomes something more like a widely available resource that individual users and companies can download, run themselves, and customize to their internal specifications — rather than having to go through a handful of companies that control access. “The defining questions of our age are who will have access to superintelligence and what will we direct it towards,” Zuckerberg wrote in August. “Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?”

There’s a lot of money riding on this bet. Huang’s Nvidia manufactures chips used to train AI models and would like more customers (and just this month agreed to buy Hugging Face, a repository of open models). Zuckerberg’s Meta has hoped to be the US leader in open model development. 

More broadly, software startup founders and the venture capitalists who fund them can benefit from powerful open weight AI being widely available, since it’s a cheaper alternative to OpenAI and Anthropic’s expensive products. Sacks, as a co-founder of the venture capitalist firm Craft Ventures, and host of a popular podcast with three fellow venture capitalists, is more closely tied to this part of the tech ecosystem than any other.

Many believe that capable open weight AI presents a serious threat to the Big Two AI companies’ current dominance of the AI frontier, and thus their business model. The flip side is that some have argued that the Big Two present an “existential threat” to the software industry, predicting the frontier labs’ products could take over much of what today’s software companies do.

But regarding safety concerns, advocates have warned about the dangers of both closed “frontier” models and open models. “On the open source side in particular, it’s easier to have a bad actor — a terrorist group, a rogue nation, an extremist political group that wants to cause chaos,” said Brendan Steinhauser of the Alliance for Secure AI, an AI safety advocacy group. “They can strip out safety features and guardrails, they can do some fine tuning to basically make the models even more dangerous, and get them to help them develop biological weapons.”

The open weight AI faction argues, though, that intrusive government regulation on AI would end up mostly hurting open models and the companies that use them — entrenching the dominance of OpenAI and Anthropic, who would be better able to comply with onerous safety requirements given their size. They’ve publicly pooh-poohed AI’s existential risks, instead playing up what they say are the dangers that AI’s power will be controlled by a privileged few. Less regulation, Sacks argues, will let more flowers bloom.

These concerns aren’t only held by those with financial stakes. There’s also a school of thought on the left that is deeply suspicious of OpenAI and Anthropic’s intentions, and particularly around the companies’ desire for an exemption from antitrust enforcement, which they say will let them work together to address safety. 

Commentator Matt Stoller has argued that those warning about dangerous “superintelligence” are playing into the hands of tech “oligarchs.” And a recent American Prospect article said policymakers should “avoid codifying the preferences of the very companies who are generating the panic.” On the right, Sens. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Ted Cruz (R-TX) have expressed similar concerns that large AI companies’ demands for restrictions are a cover for consolidating market dominance. 

At a Politico event Wednesday — and to give a sense of just how strange the bedfellows can be around this issue — Sacks stressed that he agreed with former Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan that existing liability law already applies to AI companies. But while Khan said she was open to adding new legal restrictions, Sacks is arguing that existing law is perfectly sufficient for addressing safety risks. “These CEOs are going to be subject to massive civil and criminal liability if they put out products that are unsafe,” he said.

In other comments at the event, Sacks did appear to have softened his tone a bit, saying he was “open to ideas” about AI safety, and that “we should have an intelligent conversation” about how to manage risks. The problem, he argued, was that “what’s going on right now is a fear campaign” that makes such an intelligent conversation impossible.

Former Rep. Brad Carson, who heads Americans for Responsible Innovation, an AI safety advocacy group, said that Sacks has been the one preventing such a conversation. “When it comes to AI policy the Trump administration has, through their unwillingness to even talk about reasonable guardrails, brought things to such a crisis point that the industry is in jeopardy,” Carson said. “In many ways, David Sacks is the author of that ill-fated intransigence.”

Sacks, for his part, has pointed to Anthropic’s funding of much of the AI safety advocacy world — for instance, the company has given $40 million to an advocacy group founded by Carson — and said the company is “running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear-mongering.”

If we’re in an AI race with China, why are some of Trump’s policies friendly to Chinese AI?

The influence of Sacks and his worldview could help explain another seeming mystery of the administration: If Trump thinks it’s so crucial that the United States beats China in the AI race, why has he been so willing to bless the sale of AI chips abroad — including even to China?

National security hawks both inside and outside the Trump administration had warned against these sales and hoped to impose stringent controls on the export of Nvidia chips, fearing that if too many got out, the US would squander its AI lead over China.

Huang lobbied intensely against this, hoping to sell Nvidia’s most advanced chips to Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — and trying to resume sales of a less advanced but still sophisticated AI chip to China itself. Sacks became Huang’s biggest champion inside the administration — and they won over the president. Sacks publicly argued that blocking US chip sales to China and other countries would provide an opening for Chinese companies like Huawei to dominate their domestic market and gain a greater global market share with competing chips, putting the US on weaker footing in the long run.

National security-minded critics disagreed, arguing that Sacks’s particular vision for AI will likely, in practice, strengthen China’s AI sector. “I think we can have a reasonable debate on domestic policy,” said McGuire of the Council on Foreign Relations. “But when we start from the premise that the American AI stack — models, cloud, and chips — should be dominant globally, then selling China the technology to advance its own capability obviously undercuts that.”

China also looms over the cause of open weight AI that Sacks champions — because it’s Chinese companies like DeepSeek and Moonshot that produce some of the leading open weight models that US software startups currently use.

OpenAI and Anthropic argue that these Chinese models present national security risks, claim they rely heavily on copying or “distilling” their own models, and want the US government to scrutinize them. Some Trump officials have reportedly been sympathetic to their concerns, but the administration hasn’t restricted these Chinese models’ use in the US. Sacks argues that a US ban on Chinese open weight models will just end up enshrining the OpenAI-Anthropic duopoly he so loathes.

Overall, though, on both national security risks and AI safety risks, Sacks and Huang still seem to have the president’s ear. 

On Monday, Sacks was onstage with Huang at the live All-In podcast event discussing the “doomer hoax” when a purportedly impromptu call came through for the Nvidia CEO: It was Trump. 

“The robots are not going to be taking over the world,” Trump said on speakerphone. “That’s not going to happen.”

Then, after speaking for several minutes, Trump added: “David has done an amazing job.”

Source: Vox.