David Sachs is done as AI czar — here’s what he’s doing instead

David Sachs is done with his days as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar.

In an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday, the longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster confirmed that his non-consecutive 130-day term as a special government employee has ended and that he will become co-chair of 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 ​​will allow me to make recommendations on a wide range of technology topics, not just AI,” he told Bloomberg in a video interview. “Yes, this is how I will be involved going forward.”

What this means in practice is that Mr. Sachs will be further removed from the center of power in Washington than he has been since the beginning of the second Trump administration. As the AI ​​czar, Mr. Sachs had direct access to Mr. Trump and was involved in shaping policy. PCAST ​​is a federal advisory body, so it investigates issues, writes reports, and sends recommendations upstream, but it does not create policy.

The council has been around in some form since FDR, but Sachs told Bloomberg that it’s hard to argue that this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like this” ever assembled. The initial 15 members include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Marc Andreessen, AMD’s Lisa Su, and Michael Dell. (That’s a lot of billionaires.)

Sachs told Bloomberg that the council will address AI, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear power, with near-term attention focused on advancing President Trump’s National AI Framework, which was announced just last week. The framework is intended to replace what Sachs described to Bloomberg as a confusing mess of conflicting state-level rules. “Fifty different states regulate in 50 different ways, creating a patchwork of regulations that are difficult for our nation’s innovators to comply with,” he said.

What Sachs didn’t address up front was why the transition was happening now and whether his recent comments were a factor. Earlier this month, on the popular podcast “All In,” which he co-hosts, Sachs publicly appealed to the administration to find a way out of the U.S.-backed war with Iran, calling for a graceful exit given a series of deteriorating scenarios, including attacks on neighboring countries’ oil infrastructure, destruction of desalination plants, and possible nuclear use by Israel. President Trump told reporters that Sachs had not talked to him about the war. (The US-Israel war against Iran has currently been going on for about 27 days.)

Asked about the podcast episode by Bloomberg on Thursday, Sachs figuratively threw up his hands and said, “I’m not on the diplomatic team, I’m not on the national security team,” adding that the comments on the podcast represent his personal views, not his official position.

It is worth looking back at the council’s history for the many notable names that Mr. Sacks brought to PCAST. The Council is an advisory body that has some influence over some regimes, but little influence over others.

President Obama’s version appears to have been the most productive on record, churning out 36 reports over eight years. Two of the cases led to specific policy changes, including an FDA rule opening up the over-the-counter hearing aid market.

By contrast, President Trump’s first-term council took nearly three years just to appoint its first members and produced a handful of reports without any notable accomplishments. President Biden’s council, on the other hand, was heavily weighted toward academic content, including Nobel laureates, MacArthur Fellows, and members of the National Academy of Sciences, and released a modest number of reports by the end of his administration.

Today’s PCAST ​​is a completely different animal, built almost entirely from the executive suites of the companies that form the technologies it advises.

Now, Sachs is once again an unfettered executive, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokesperson for Craft Ventures, where Mr. Sachs co-founded and remains a partner, did not yet respond to related questions about next steps. TechCrunch reported last year about the ethics exemption that Sachs obtained to shape federal policy in both areas while maintaining financial stakes in AI and crypto companies. The deal drew harsh criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.