David Sachs is done with his role as AI czar, here’s what he’s doing instead

David Sachs spent his days as an AI and cryptocurrency official under Donald Trump.

Speaking with Bloomberg on Thursday, the entrepreneur, investor and longtime podcast host confirmed that his 130-day non-consecutive stint as a special government employee has ended and that he will move on to chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) alongside White House senior technology adviser Michael Kratsios.

“I believe that by moving forward as co-chair of PCAST, I can now make recommendations not only on AI but also on an expanded range of technology topics,” he told Bloomberg via video interview. “So yeah, that’s how I’ll be involved moving forward.”

What this means in practical terms is that Sachs will be much further from the center of power in Washington than he has been since the beginning of the second Trump administration. As AI czar, Sachs had a direct line to Trump and had a role in shaping policy. PCAST ​​is a federal advisory body, so while it studies issues, issues reports and sends recommendations across the chain, it does not set policy.

The Council has been around in some form since Franklin Roosevelt, although Sachs pointed to Bloomberg when he noted that this particular iteration had “the most powerful star power of any group like this” ever assembled, and it’s hard to say he’s wrong. The first 15 members include Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Marc Andreessen, AMD’s Lisa Su, and Michael Dell, among others.

That’s a lot of billionaires.

Sachs told Bloomberg that the council will address artificial intelligence, advanced semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear energy, and that near-term attention will be toward advancing Trump’s National AI Framework, which was released just last week. The framework aims to replace what Sachs described to Bloomberg as a chaos of conflicting rules at the state level. “You have 50 different states regulating this in 50 different ways, and that creates a patchwork of regulation that is difficult for our innovators to adhere to,” he said.

What Sacks did not directly address is why the shift is happening now and whether his recent comments were a factor. Earlier this month, on the popular “All In” show he co-hosts, Sachs publicly urged the administration to find a way out of the U.S.-backed war with Iran, going beyond a host of worsening scenarios — attacks on oil infrastructure in neighboring countries, the destruction of desalination plants, the possibility of nuclear use by Israel — and calling for a polite way out. Trump responded by telling reporters that Sachs had not talked to him about the war.

When asked about it Thursday by Bloomberg, Sachs figuratively threw his hands in the air: “I’m not a member of the foreign policy team or the national security team,” adding that his comments on the podcast represented his personal view, not official.

For all the notable names Sachs brought to PCAST, it’s worth considering what the council has been historically, an advisory body with real influence in some departments and almost none in others.

President Obama’s version was apparently the most productive of all, issuing 36 reports over eight years — two of which led to tangible policy changes, including an FDA rule that opened the market to over-the-counter hearing aids.

By contrast, President Trump’s first-term Council took only nearly three years to name its first members, issued a number of reports, and left no particular mark, while President Biden’s Council was largely academic—Nobel laureates, MacArthur fellows, National Academy members—and issued a modest number of reports before the administration ended.

Today’s PCAST ​​is a whole different animal, composed almost entirely of executives and activist investors working to build the technology with which the United States hopes to dominate the world.

Now, Sacks is one of them again, potentially free to resume his life as an investor and entrepreneur. A spokeswoman for Craft Ventures, the company Sachs co-founded and in which he remains a partner, has not yet responded to related questions, but TechCrunch reported last year on ethics waivers Sachs took to maintain financial stakes in AI and cryptocurrency companies while shaping federal policy in both areas — an arrangement that drew sharp criticism from ethics experts and lawmakers.