Former White House 'AI czar' David Sacks discusses AI regulation, competition with China and the dangers of AI-enhanced 'cyber weapons' on 'Kudlow.'
Former White House “AI czar” David Sacks warned Monday that an overreach in artificial intelligence could destroy the United States, which is leading China in the global race to dominate AI.
“If you try to have an AI FDA and there are other people who want to go that far, I think we might lose this AI race to China,” Kudlow said on Monday. “We only have six to nine months before China. So, every month is important.”
His comments 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 a wider public release.
Sacks, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, advocated for a lighter approach to AI regulation and warned that adding too many guardrails jeopardized innovation in a key area of competition with Beijing.
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US President Donald Trump (L) shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on May 14, 2026. (Kenny HOLSTON / POOL / AFP via Getty Images / Getty Images)
He likened Washington's “huge” desire to control AI to that of climate change.
“AI has become the new climate change,” he said. “It's this imminent massacre that calls for government intervention. But there's very little evidence to support that.”
“We're open to evidence – if there really is 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 acknowledged that some frontier AI models — including Anthropic's Mythos, which he described as “cyber weapon-level” — pose serious cybersecurity concerns, he also warned of a “moral panic” surrounding the emerging technology.
“There's a panic, almost like a moral panic, around AI,” he told host Larry Kudlow. “And I fear that we might overreact and shoot ourselves in the foot and give this amazing technology to China.
David Sacks, White House Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Crypto czar, during the White House Digital Assets Summit in the State Dining Room of the White House in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, March 7, 2025. (Chris Kleponis/CNP/Bloomberg via Getty Images/Getty Images)
Sacks also pushed back on concerns that AI will take jobs from ordinary Americans, pointing to recent labor market strength in May's strong jobs report.
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“There have been a lot of claims that AI is going to create some sort of imminent jobs apocalypse, but we're seeing the exact opposite right now,” argued the former AI governor.
“We just had this report of gang jobs in May, something like 172,000 new jobs, double what all the economists expected, and a lot of that is because of AI.”
Sacks said a unified playbook for managing AI would be preferable to the patchwork, state-by-state regulations that have guarded the technology since its inception.
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“That's what President Trump called a single piece of legislation. And I think if we can get that, if we work with Congress to make a compromise, that would be better than a patchwork from the states,” he told FOX Business.
Trump will reportedly meet with executives from leading AI companies at the White House this week as the administration weighs its next steps on AI policy.
