Venture capitalist David Sacks is backing President Donald Trump’s push for a “one rulebook” for Artificial Intelligence, warning that fragmented state laws could undermine U.S. innovation and global competitiveness.
Unified Rulebook Not ‘AI Amnesty’
On Monday, Sacks, who currently serves as the Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, lauded Trump’s move in a post on X, saying that it was not an “AI amnesty” or “AI moratorium,” but rather an attempt to determine “a question of jurisdiction.”
He argued that when AI development, training and deployment occur across multiple states, it is “clearly interstate commerce,” which is exactly the type of economic activity that the writers of the Constitution “intended to reserve for the Federal government.”
Sacks said the absence of federal preemption has already produced a “patchwork of 50 different regulatory regimes,” pointing to more than 1,200 state-level bills and over 100 enacted measures.
He pointed to states such as Colorado, California and Illinois, which have created liability for AI developers if their models contribute to “algorithmic discrimination,” defined as having a “disparate impact” on protected groups.
“This type of ideological meddling is how we ended up with ‘black George Washington,'” Sacks said, referring to Google’s Gemini, which was accused of generating historically inaccurate images last year. According to Sacks, “AI models should strive for the truth and be ideologically unbiased.”
He cautioned that if every state sets its own rules, the industry could splinter into “50 different AI models for 50 different states,” creating what he called a regulatory morass “worse than Europe” that would slow innovation, squeeze smaller startups, and leave room for China to “race ahead.”
Sacks addressed concerns around “the 4 C's,” which refers to child safety, communities, creators and censorship, which he said will remain protected under a federal framework. He added that a fifth concern, “competitiveness,” should guide national policy.
Executive Order On AI Expected This Week
In a Truth Social post on Monday, Trump argued that “AI will be destroyed in its infancy” if each of the 50 states adopts its own regulatory framework, while adding that many of those states were “bad actors.”
According to a draft order that was obtained last month, the government will create an AI Litigation Task Force inside the Justice Department, with the sole purpose of challenging state AI laws that federal officials believe is hindering the industry’s growth.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) criticized Trump’s plan, saying, “Trump wants to deregulate AI and let the richest people on earth do whatever they want. Unacceptable.”
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