David Sacks, who stepped down as President Trump’s AI and crypto czar in March, says it’s “100%” that the Democrats who just won Congress will make a major push for AI legislation, and that the end state is “a surveillance and censorship state that’s turbocharged by superintelligence.”
Sacks was answering co-host Jason Calacanis on the All-In podcast released Nov. 7. Calacanis asked for odds on a scenario co-host David Friedberg had laid out, in which only the government can use the tools. Sacks said he didn’t think it would go that far, then laid out the road map he does expect: “You create a department, a federal department of AI. You require that all the so-called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that.”
“The regulators give their notes on it. You can’t get a model released unless you address their concerns,” Sacks said. Those concerns, in his telling, would be “disinformation and misinformation and dissonant thought” – “all the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censor during COVID.”
“They’re going to basically reenact that whole regime again using AI. And it’s going to be infinitely more powerful because we’re talking about superintelligence here,” Sacks said. “So I do believe that that is the regime that we’re headed towards.”
