Quick Take

Trump’s Selection of an “AI Czar” Raises Concerns About Conflicts of Interest

Paul M. Barrett

December 9, 2024

Many observers have noted the dangers of conflicts of interest in the incoming Trump administration. The Trump family itself is one concern. Elon Musk, whose businesses enjoy billions of dollars in government contracts, poses another.

Now, Trump’s designation of Silicon Valley financier and Musk ally David Sacks as White House “Artificial Intelligence and Crypto Czar” creates yet another opportunity for private business interests to benefit from government authority.

TIME summarized the situation concisely:

Sacks has been rewarded with a position inside the White House: the brand-new role of “AI & crypto czar.” It’s unclear how much power this role has. It appears that this will be a part-time role, and that Sacks will remain with his VC fund Craft. This murkiness, and the fact that Sacks will not have to go through the Senate confirmation process, is drawing concerns over conflict of interest and lack of oversight. Regardless, Sacks will start the Administration with Trump’s ear on key policy decisions in these two rapidly growing sectors. Leaders inside both industries largely cheered the decision.

The salient question: To what degree will Sacks’ (and Musk’s) business interests related to AI and cryptocurrencies shape administration policies?

More from TIME:

Sacks is a player in the AI ecosystem himself: this year, he launched an AI-powered work chat app called Glue. He has often expressed support for a freer ecosystem empowering AI companies to grow, and has argued that most of what’s on the internet should be available for AI to train upon under fair use.

Sacks represents a pattern emerging throughout the tech industry concerning business leaders who condemned Trump and his more militant supporters for the January 6, 2021, violent insurrection and attempt to overturn the presidential election of 2020 when they assumed Trump would be banished from the national stage. Now, as Judd Legum at Popular Information has observed, some of these CEOs and others have forgotten their past criticism of Trump’s undermining of the rule of law to congratulate him on his return to power.

As for Sacks on this point, once more from TIME:

After the Jan. 6 insurrection, Sacks said that Trump had “disqualified himself from being a candidate at the national level again.” But he threw his weight behind Trump this year, including during a speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, in which he warned Republicans of a “world on fire.” At one lavish fundraiser, Sacks lobbied for Trump to pick J.D. Vance as his running mate. Sacks also hosted Trump on All-In, and complained that it was “so hard to do business” during the Biden Administration.

Sacks has taken his turnabout on Trump further than many others in Silicon Valley, becoming a major Trump fundraiser, cheerleader — and potentially influential AI adviser.