Excerpt from a June 10, 2025 interview with David Sacks (White House AI and Crypto Czar).
Sacks: "Well, I mean, the speed definitely matters. This is a race — a race to build out infrastructure, a race to build out applications, a race to proliferate those applications, and a race to get users. And we want to win. We want American companies to win that race.
There are a bunch of tactical things we can do. We have to build out more power generation. We have to make permitting easier. We have to remove friction in building out data centers. We need constructive regulation, as opposed to regulation that hobbles our companies and creates a huge compliance load. So there are a number of practical steps we should be thinking about.
But at a higher level, there is a big intellectual competition happening in our public discourse between the so-called A.I. doomers — people who believe A.I. is going to lead to something like the Terminator, as portrayed in movies — and the desire of the ecosystem to actually advance this technology.
I do think that this doomer cult, or mentality — whatever you want to call it — has captured the minds of a lot of people. For example, there are currently about a thousand bills working their way through state legislatures to regulate A.I. A thousand bills. We are only two and a half years into this technology, and there are already a thousand bills.
If we had taken this approach toward the internet — a fear-based regulatory approach with hundreds or thousands of regulations — I don’t think the United States would have become the dominant country in the internet era. When you look at what the internet has done for our economy, our stature in the world, and our military, it is one of the crown jewels of the American economy.
I worry that we are on a trajectory where fear overtakes opportunity and we end up crippling this progress in technological innovation. That’s not to say there aren’t real concerns — I understand those concerns, and we can talk through them — but the truth is it’s very hard to put percentages on those risks today. They’re being hyped as if they are imminent, when we don’t actually know if they will happen, when they will happen, or how to prevent them.
There isn’t a clear regulatory solution right now. And whatever regulations we come up with, China is not bound by them.
One of the biggest risks of A.I. is that we end up with a CCP-controlled A.I. or AGI becoming dominant. We can’t seek to prevent one risk without considering all the others. If we hobble ourselves, that does nothing to hobble China.
There was a misguided view even a year ago that the United States had such a large lead that we could regulate however we wanted without consequences. The idea that China was far behind was exposed as a fallacy. China is not years behind us in A.I. — maybe three to six months. It’s a very close race.
They have tremendous talent. Something like half of the world’s A.I. researchers are Chinese. They have a tremendous amount of power. They’re behind in chips, but certainly Huawei is trying to do everything they can to catch up. And so, I think we do have to take this threat seriously.
At the same time, we can’t be guided totally out of fear. We have to be realistic as well. And I think we should be evidence-based about these things."