Former White House “AI czar” David Sacks warned Monday that overregulation of artificial intelligence could erode America’s lead over China in the global race for AI dominance.
“If you try to have an FDA for AI and there are some people who want to go that far, then I think we could lose this AI race to China,” he said Monday on “Kudlow.” “We’re only six to nine months ahead of China. So really, every month counts.”
His remarks come after President Donald Trump signed an executive order last week establishing a voluntary framework for AI companies to share certain advanced models with the federal government before wider public release.
Sacks, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, advocated for a lighter approach to AI regulation and cautioned that adding too many guardrails risks stifling innovation at a critical point in the competition with Beijing.
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He likened Washington’s “tremendous” desire to regulate AI to that of climate change.
“AI has become the new climate change,” he argued. “It’s this imminent catastrophe that is requiring all this government intervention. But there’s very little evidence to support it.”
“We’re open to evidence – if there’s actually a problem, we should do something about it. But I don’t think we should do it in this knee-jerk way,” he continued.
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While Sacks admitted that some frontier AI models – including Anthropic’s Mythos, which he described as an “at the level of a cyber weapon” – present serious cybersecurity concerns, he also cautioned against the “moral panic” surrounding emerging technology.
“There is this panic, almost like a moral panic, around AI,” he told host Larry Kudlow. “And I’m just afraid that we might overreact and shoot ourselves in the foot and then hand this incredible technology to China.
Sacks also pushed back on concerns that AI will take jobs from average Americans, pointing to recent labor market strength from a strong May jobs report.
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“There’s been a lot of claims that AI is gonna create some sort of imminent job apocalypse, but we’re seeing the exact opposite right now,” the former AI czar argued.
“We just had this gangbuster jobs report in May, something like 172,000 new jobs, twice what all the economists were expecting, and a lot of that is because of AI.”
Sacks said a unified federal playbook for AI governance would be preferable to a patchwork, state-by-state regulations that have been guard railing the technology since its emergence.
“What President Trump has called for is one rulebook. And I think if we can get that, if we work with Congress to work out a compromise, then that would be better than patchwork from the states,” he told FOX Business.
Trump is reportedly set to meet with executives from leading AI companies at the White House this week as the administration weighs its next steps on AI policy.
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