Michael Kratsios turns OSTP into Trump's AI policy engine

Kratsios's path runs from a 30-year-old working on Peter Thiel's trading floor in 2016 to a White House aide entrusted with turning the President's impulses into policy. He identified OSTP as an underused lever and moved into it as deputy chief technology officer in 2017, when no director was in place — a role that required no Senate confirmation.

That history explains the current dynamic. Because Trump prefers to hear debate in the room rather than read background papers, and because outside voices he listens to shift from day to day, the staffer who stays and drafts the paperwork can carry outsized influence. Kratsios is cautious with the President and critics see too few perspectives of his own, but that caution is a deliberate choice by someone who does not think he has political capital to spend.

The space transportation policy anecdote shows the pattern: Trump called Musk, then Bezos, for approval, and Kratsios briefed them on speaker and then wrote the policy. The White House Accord on Superintelligence is the clearest example of the gap between ceremony and content — a signing, and an executive order that renamed AI to SI. Kratsios's role is less about setting the direction than about converting the President's calls into the documents that direct the government.