Former White House AI Adviser Calls Safety Fears ‘Hollywood Storytelling’

The White House’s most influential AI and crypto policy voice just called AI safety the ‘new Climate Change’, referring to the amount of ‘Hollywood storytelling’ involved. This comes six days after his administration signed an AI safety order.

On Monday, David Sacks, who served as the White House Special Advisor for AI and Crypto and now advises the administration through the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, reposted this on X:

Contradiction Inside the White House?

Six days before Sacks posted his tweet, President Trump signed an executive order asking AI companies to voluntarily submit their most powerful models to federal safety testing up to 30 days before public release.

The order directed federal agencies to develop safety benchmarks, assess AI models for cyber capabilities, and shore up critical infrastructure defenses.

Sacks helped build the policy environment that produced that order. However, he is now publicly raising the heightened safety concerns of some, similar to climate change scaremongering.

This appears to be a deliberate signal about the administration’s true stance on AI safety, regardless of the document issued a week ago.

This is not new. Sacks has framed regulatory interference in emerging technology as a power grab rather than a legitimate function before.

Sacks has also called AI safety advocates a “Doomer Industrial Complex“, a coordinated effort by former Biden staffers and effective altruists to inflate AI threat narratives for political purposes.

What the David Sacks Framing Means for Crypto and AI Tokens

Sacks also drove the CLARITY Act through its early legislative stages, and the crypto market structure bill is now working through the Senate.

His framing of AI regulation as a “takeover of the economy and information space” directly mirrors the argument his office used against aggressive crypto oversight: safety narratives are a cover for regulatory expansion, not genuine consumer protection.

Sacks seems to be building a single political argument against both AI and crypto regulation: safety concerns are political weapons, not technical realities. For AI-linked crypto tokens and the likes, the White House’s posture on AI regulation sets the tone for the next four years.

The administration that backed crypto helped move the CLARITY Act and, in 2025, the US stablecoin framework, the GENIUS Act, became law. The same administration is now framing heavy-handed AI safety as leftist pseudoscience.

The fight Sacks is previewing will determine whether AI safety regulation looks like climate policy: sweeping, expensive, and politically defining for a generation. He is betting it does not.

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