Trump’s ‘biggest miscalculation’? How one adviser steered the great AI freakout

David Sacks convinced Trump against any restrictions on AI – putting the White House out of step with its own party

As lawmakers from both sides of the aisle in the US have joined together calling for the regulation of powerful artificial intelligence models, one of the few vocal naysayers has been Donald Trump. He’s called the perceived dangers of the technology a “hoax” and a “scam”, arguing that the government already has “tremendous CRIMINAL and REGULATORY power over these companies”.

It’s a starkly different stance from those of his former adviser Steve Bannon, the Republican Texas senator Ted Cruz and even the heads of the world’s leading AI companies. But it’s directly in line with the opinion of David Sacks – a prominent billionaire venture capitalist and Trump’s onetime AI and crypto czar, who has pushed back publicly and forcefully against recent claims of an impending AI apocalypse.

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