Donald Trump announced Thursday he intends to make tech investor David Sacks his cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence “czar,” essentially giving Sacks the reins to steer the administration’s policy on both fronts.
The position would enable Sacks to potentially recommend that artificial intelligence be used in ways that could allow Trump and his crypto bro backers to enrich themselves and worsen inequality.
A former PayPal executive, Sacks is a part-time podcaster and member of the Big Tech oligarchy that has become a major financier of Republican politicians. He helped garner support from Silicon Valley elites for Trump, an effort that included hosting a ritzy fundraiser in June. Sacks has been obsessed with rooting out “wokeness” in American society and has also peddled the pro-Kremlin talking point that Russia was “provoked” to invade Ukraine. Sacks is an ally of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, who, as Joy Reid highlighted in October, spent all or some of their youths in apartheid South Africa. Joy’s segment discusses how the conservative politics all three men are boosting here resemble the ones that dominated South Africa at that time. Sacks also sits on the board of directors for the far-right video platform Rumble.
More relevant to his proposed portfolio, Sacks launched an artificial intelligence company called Glue this year and is known to be a major investor in cryptocurrencies, which would seem likely to create some conflicts of interest if he’s steering the administration’s AI and crypto policies. The New York Times, citing Sacks’ company, reports that the “position is not full time,” so it’s unclear right now whether Sacks’ role will carry any real weight or be simply advisory.
Particularly when it comes to AI, it’s hard to understate the kind of influence Sacks could have on virtually every aspect of American life. In the coming months and years, an AI czar is likely to face questions of how the country should guard against AI-enabled attacks from foreign adversaries; of how the government could —or should — deploy AI to surveil American citizens and, potentially, crack down on abortion; and of the potential harms to nonwhite residents from AI algorithms, which have been shown to exacerbate housing discrimination, disparities in the criminal justice system and disproportionate auditing from the Internal Revenue Service.
By giving a position like this to a Trump loyalist like Sacks, who’s already shown his commitment to the MAGA cause, it’s possible the administration will not put many guardrails around what is arguably the most powerful emerging technology — artificial intelligence.
Earlier this year, President Joe Biden warned that “we must make certain that the awesome capabilities of AI will be used to uplift and empower everyday people, not to give dictators more powerful shackles on the human spirit.” With Sacks informing the administration’s AI and crypto policies, the U.S. might be the ones forging those chains.
