How David Sacks Talked Trump Into Wiping Out State AI Rules

Key points

• A presidential executive order signed by Trump uses federal authority to override state-level artificial intelligence regulations across the United States.
• The order cites an ongoing race with adversaries and calls state rules a barrier to U.S. AI leadership.
• David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and Trump's former AI and crypto policy adviser, publicly opposed AI restrictions and is widely credited with shaping this position.
• Bipartisan support for AI oversight in Congress now puts the White House at odds with members of Trump's own Republican Party, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

If your state was trying to put guardrails on AI companies, the federal government is telling it to stand down. That's the short version of the executive order Trump signed, which builds on a January 2025 directive that scrapped Biden-era AI rules.

The new order declares that the United States is in a technology race it can't afford to lose. Excessive regulation at the state level, the White House argues, would hand the advantage to adversaries. China isn't named, but the framing leaves little ambiguity.

Who convinced Trump this was the right call?

The fingerprints belong largely to David Sacks. A billionaire venture capitalist and Trump-appointed AI and crypto policy lead, Sacks has argued loudly that warnings about AI catastrophe are overblown, and his view now sits at the centre of White House policy.

That position is a real outlier. Senators from both parties have been pushing for federal oversight of the most powerful AI models, large language models being the technology behind tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Trump has called AI safety a sick conspiracy and, as we reported on 17 September, declared AI risk a "hoax" onstage alongside Nvidia chief Jensen Huang. Huang himself stayed quiet. Republican senator Ted Cruz and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon have both expressed concern about unchecked AI development, leaving the White House as the lonely voice against guardrails in its own coalition.

What does this actually change for ordinary people?

If you live in a state that passed, or was about to pass, its own AI consumer protections, those rules are now legally contested ground. Think disclosure requirements for AI-generated content, or limits on how companies can use your data to train their models. Both of those efforts are now up against a federal order that treats them as obstacles.

The privacy catch is real. Fewer state-level rules means fewer local checkpoints on what AI companies can collect or do with your personal information, and federal law doesn't currently fill that gap with anything close to the detail some states were building.

The Guardian, which first reported the broader political context, notes that even AI company executives, including Anthropic's Dario Amodei, have called for some form of oversight. We covered the White House response to that call on 17 September, when Trump and House Republicans told AI chiefs to keep their foot on the gas.

Should you be worried?

The White House has made a deliberate bet: speed of development over consumer protection, federal uniformity over state experimentation. Whether it pays off depends entirely on whether the companies being freed from oversight police themselves. History gives you little reason to assume they will.