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.

The longtime entrepreneur, investor, and podcaster confirmed in an interview with Bloomberg on Thursday that he will serve as co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) with White House Senior Technology Adviser Michael Kratsios, ending his 130-day nonconsecutive term as a special government employee.

“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 much further removed from the center of power in Washington than he was at the start 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 this particular iteration has “the most star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to argue that’s wrong. 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, Mr. 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 worsening scenarios, including attacks on neighboring countries’ oil infrastructure, the destruction of desalination plants, and possible nuclear use by Israel. President Trump told reporters that Sachs had not talked to him about the war.

Asked about this 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 his comments on the podcast represented his personal views, not his official position.

For all the big names Sacks brought to PCAST, it’s worth looking back at what the council has been like historically. The Council is an advisory body that has substantial influence over some regimes and 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 likely to be one of them again, free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokesperson for Craft Ventures, which Sachs co-founded and where he remains a partner, has not yet responded to related questions, but TechCrunch reported last year about ethics exemptions Sachs obtained to maintain financial stakes in AI and crypto companies while shaping federal policy in both areas. The deal drew harsh criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.