White House shifts to AI model review after David Sacks ousted as AI czar

David Sacks, a billionaire venture capitalist and Trump fundraiser who served as AI and crypto czar, was pushed out of his job. As a special government employee, he had been supposed to work only 130 days but remained for an entire year, during which he actively tried twice to get Congress to pass a moratorium on state AI laws and attempted to use an executive order to grant the Trump administration powers to sue states passing or enforcing such laws.

The White House is now considering having the government review AI models before release — a reversal of Trump's year-long advocacy for pro-industry deregulation. The Commerce Department announced that the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), run by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), would conduct pre-deployment testing on commercial frontier AI models before release and has already struck agreements with xAI, Microsoft, and Google DeepMind.

The policy shift was driven by three factors: the leak of Anthropic's Mythos, an AI model so powerful at finding cybersecurity vulnerabilities that the company refused to release it publicly; other countries beginning to lay out their own AI regulations; and Sacks being removed, reducing Silicon Valley's direct mechanism to pitch an industry-friendly agenda to Trump. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles met with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in April, signaling serious national security engagement on the issue.