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President Trump wants one federal set of rules for artificial intelligence. He wants to limit the ability of states to design their own AI regulations. The president signed an executive order to this effect on Thursday, and the architect of that order was David Sacks, the president's adviser on AI and crypto. Sacks has helped to cement an alliance between Trump and Silicon Valley. He also has been on the defensive over how his financial investments could be influencing policy. NPR's Bobby Allyn has more.
BOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: David Sacks has been a big name in Silicon Valley since the early 2000s. He's part of a group, along with Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who have become known as the PayPal Mafia for helping to spark the digital economy after the dot-com bust. Now, about a year into his time in the White House, some routine government paperwork has become the subject of fierce debate about whether Sacks is using his powerful position to advance his own interests. The public documents are known as ethics waivers. Here's Kathleen Clark. She's a government ethics expert at Washington University in St. Louis.
KATHLEEN CLARK: It's basically carte blanche to influence U.S. policy on artificial intelligence in a way that may have, you know, an enormous impact on his personal finances.
ALLYN: The documents state that while Sacks did stop investing in Amazon, Meta and Musk's xAI, he and his venture capital firm, Craft Ventures, are holding onto more than 400 investments in companies involved in AI in some way. Clark says this kind of sweeping waiver is unusual and is a way of ensuring Sacks isn't ever investigated for breaking conflict-of-interest laws. Clark described it this way.
CLARK: It's like a presidential pardon in advance. Go ahead and take action that would ordinarily violate the criminal conflict-of-interest statute. We won't prosecute you for it.
ALLYN: The New York Times recently put a spotlight on Sacks' AI and crypto investments, and dozens of Sacks' friends in the tech world took to X to praise him and attack the paper. Sacks wouldn't talk to NPR, but he waved away the conflict-of-interest questions on his podcast "All-In," which he co-hosts alongside his work in the White House.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALL-IN")
DAVID SACKS: The truth is that I divested hundreds of millions of dollars of positions in promising technology ventures at a substantial cost to my net worth. So not only is this job not benefiting me, it's actually cost me a lot of money to serve.
ALLYN: Sacks said the Office of Government Ethics signed off on his public waivers detailing his investments.
(SOUNDBITE OF PODCAST, "ALL-IN")
SACKS: And they're the ones who concluded that I did not have any conflicts.
ALLYN: His views on AI are often described as accelerationist, meaning he wants to go full speed ahead with AI development with as few guardrails as possible, like the recent executive order he helped write, seeking to override state AI laws. And that has been met with resistance from others in the MAGA world who distrust the tech elite and see AI as a danger to humanity. This includes Steve Bannon, the president's former top adviser. I caught him shortly after he spent some time at Trump's Mar-a-Lago, where he's been trying to fight Sacks' policies.
STEVE BANNON: So I think the issue with Sacks is, to me, it's not he's got these conflicts. My bigger problem is his judgment.
ALLYN: Bannon says Sacks is only interested in the tech industry's growing dominance and not interested at all in safety. Bannon has called on AI labs to stop pursuing superintelligence until the risks are better understood.
BANNON: Right now, you have more regulations, 10 times more regulations to open a nail salon on Capitol Hill than you have in one of the most promising yet most dangerous technologies ever invented.
ALLYN: One thing Bannon says he's really worried about - Sacks and his allies in the administration convincing the federal government to bail out the tech industry if the AI bubble bursts.
BANNON: When you start talking about their equity and if the taxpayer is going to step up and give a guarantee, then that's got to be kind of chopped up and dealt out. We'll see - we're going to see what kind of public servants these guys are.
ALLYN: Just two years ago, before the government rescued the failed Silicon Valley Bank, who was one of the loudest voices asking for a bailout? David Sacks.
Bobby Allyn, NPR News.
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