How David Sacks crashed and burned in the White House

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On Monday, The New York Times reported that the White House was considering having the government review AI models before release. To the casual Verge reader, it appeared to be a total reversal in Donald Trump’s policies. For the past year, he had been a vocal champion of pro-industry deregulation, repealing former President Joe Biden’s massive executive order on AI safety, lifting export controls on advanced chips, and signing executive orders that would have legally punished states for passing and enforcing AI laws in the vacuum of federal legislation. Now, the Trump administration has seemingly pulled a 180, demanding federal oversight and vetting of pre-market models.

But to Washington, the shift in the White House’s policy was due to three major changes. First, Anthropic’s Mythos has genuinely spooked the national security apparatus, forcing the administration to confront a new threat: the possibility of adversaries using American AI models to attack America’s public and private sectors. Second, other countries are now beginning to lay out their own AI regulations, potentially in a manner that would go against the interests of the United States. (And yes, “destroying a Big Tech data center in a targeted drone strike” is a manner of government AI regulation, but we’ll get to that shortly.)

And third, David Sacks was pushed out of his job as the AI and crypto czar, giving Silicon Valley one less mechanism to pitch an industry-friendly, “innovation-at-all-costs” agenda to Trump himself.

The definition of political influence can be squishy and amorphous, especially around Donald Trump, who will pick up anyone’s calls and then act on that advice if he feels like it. (Remember when Laura Loomer had control over the National Security Council?) But what’s legally certain is that Sacks, the billionaire venture capitalist and Trump fundraiser in 2024, no longer has the privileges available to him as a special government employee, such as the ability to review sensitive information, to speak on behalf of the White House, or to hold official influence over government employees and agencies.

Instead, the “special government employee,” who was supposed to only spend 130 days working in the administration and somehow stuck around for an entire year, actively undermined the administration and torched its relationship with its political allies. During Sacks’ tenure, the White House went beyond simply advocating for less regulation. They tried twice to get Congress to pass a moratorium on state AI laws, and failing that, tried to use an executive order that would grant the Trump admin the powers to sue states passing or enforcing said laws. But his Valley-esque tactics, to say nothing of his attempts to consolidate power over AI policy by boxing out existing agencies, ended up infuriating Republican and MAGA allies, while alienating vast swaths of Trump’s base. (In fact, it was so unsuccessful that when unnamed White House officials recently attempted to pressure certain red states into dropping pending AI legislation, claiming that they were going against Trump’s agenda, four GOP state lawmakers spoke on the record to The Wall Street Journal instead. Then again, if the agenda was just to kill those bills in the cradle, it succeeded.)

Even if Sacks hadn’t crashed and burned — to say nothing of publicly criticizing Donald Trump, a man who does not like being criticized, for continuing to wage war against Iran — the job is also getting harder for one part-time employee maintaining ties to the private sector to handle. In recent months, the aperture of America’s AI policy has widened to a scale much, much broader than Sacks’ pro-innovation 2025 remit, into areas where a lack of regulation would be wildly irresponsible: national security and geopolitical stability.

A major turning point was the leak of Anthropic’s Mythos, the AI model that was so powerful at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company, whose reputation hinges on acting more responsibly than its competitors, refused to release it to the public. The possibility of a Mythos-level model becoming commercially available spooked the national security apparatus and the financial industry, and seized the attention of three powerful White House figures: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

When Bessent and Wiles met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in April, it signaled that not only were they taking the threat seriously, they were now overriding Anthropic’s enemies in the Pentagon, who had, months prior, convinced Trump that Anthropic was “woke” and should be banned for government use.

“The national security implications of something like Mythos are hard to deny, and legitimately urgent national security issues are not easy to politicize,” Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, told The Verge. “Once serious national security people get involved, it’s hard to dismiss or politicize the issue.”

In recent weeks, federal agencies that had been boxed out by Sacks are now being given more authority. On Tuesday, the Commerce Department announced that it had designated the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) as the agency that would conduct pre-deployment testing on commercial frontier AI models before release, and had already struck agreements with xAI, Microsoft, and Google DeepMind. CAISI is run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), which had been gutted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) last year, but has begun hiring for technical positions.

Other countries are flexing their muscles, too, in a way that the United States can’t directly control. The European Union is currently debating a revision to the AI Act, and though the EU countries and the European Parliament were unable to reach an agreement in the most recent negotiations, whatever does end up coming out of that legislation will have a direct impact on how frontier AI models are developed — and possibly in a way that inadvertently acts against America’s business and natsec interests.

“[Bessent] really doesn’t like the Europeans,” a tech policy adviser close to the administration told The Verge. In his view, the EU’s proposed privacy regulations would not just hurt American companies, it would also inadvertently allow China to develop faster, and there was historical precedent: “We’ve seen this movie before when it came to broadband, where they tried to do the same thing to American broadband companies. In the end, they were just helping Huawei.”

Then there are rogue geopolitical players who simply do not care what Sacks or the American government think. Days after US forces bombed Tehran and killed its religious leader, Iran conducted drone strikes on two AWS data centers in the United Arab Emirates and indirectly damaged a third data center in Bahrain, causing major power outages across the Middle East and damaging critical infrastructure. Weeks later, Iranian state media announced that it would directly target 18 major US tech companies with a presence in the region, including AI heavy hitters like Google, Meta, Microsoft, Palantir, and Nvidia, and has since claimed that it hit an Oracle data center in the UAE. (UAE media later clarified that an Oracle building in Dubai suffered minor damage from falling debris from an aerial drone interception.)

“While there’s a lot of politics around it here in the United States, where Maine is [trying] banning them, and [Republican Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis is talking about banning them, as far as the world is concerned, this is critical infrastructure,” the tech policy adviser close to the administration told me. “And that’s why one of the first things the Iranians did was bomb not just one, but two of Amazon’s critical data centers, because they know how important it is.” The damage to AWS’s data centers, which service the entire Middle East, are severe enough that even if the war were to end now, it would take “several months” to resume full operations, according to the company.

This is not to say, however, that David Sacks has no influence in the Trump administration: He has Trump’s direct cell, and he’s still a billionaire CEO, which is a better credential in Trump’s eyes than any kind of expertise. The Atlantic’s George Packer recently published a massive feature on Sacks, highlighting his plutocratic tenacity. One can’t really stop a master of the universe from trying to flex every so often. But even when it comes to Trump’s favorite rich guys, Sacks may not even stack up. Last week, Trump hosted a state banquet for King Charles III’s visit to the United States. The guest list included Tim Cook, Jensen Huang, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, corporate leadership from Meta and Alphabet — and no Sacks, who had been present at a previous state banquet held at Windsor Castle in the United Kingdom last year, while he was still at the White House.

When I asked a DC insider familiar with state dinner politics if Sacks had been invited, the answer was pretty telling: “Why would he be? He’s not White House inner circle.”

See you next week.