The race for artificial intelligence supremacy pits Silicon Valley bosses against Washington policymakers and Chinese rivals. President Donald Trump has taken a deregulatory approach to the development of artificial intelligence, sometimes ignoring criticism in favor of improving security infrastructure, a view that the government’s leading technology advisers equate to a deliberate abandonment of the race for AI dominance.
Longtime technology investor David Sacks says the so-called AI “doomster” mentality — the belief that unchecked AI will ultimately have a net negative impact on humanity and possibly even lead to the collapse of society — amounts to a “self-inflicted wound” in the United States. Sachs is a long-time technology investor who was appointed by Trump as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar.
“We generally think that optimism about AI is much lower in the West,” Sachs told a conference on Wednesday. dialogue and salesperson CEO Marc Benioff at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Sachs believed that long-running Edelman Trust Barometer Highlights a startling finding: By 2025, Americans will be more pessimistic about artificial intelligence than most people in the world.
Sacks said he worried that over-regulation of AI development, including what Senator Bernie Sanders called for last month, would spark “pessimism” pause About data center construction.
“If we have 1,200 different AI laws across states that, you know, stifle innovation, I worry that we might lose the AI race,” Sacks told Benioff.
In the year since he took office, Trump has adopted a clear free-market stance on the development of artificial intelligence. in a Artificial Intelligence Action Plan Last summer, the government repealed many regulations regarding artificial intelligence research, which coincided with Norms for the Biden Era This promotes a whole-of-government approach to federal involvement in AI governance. Trump went a step further last December, executive order This further weakens national-level regulation of the development of artificial intelligence. Global AI dominance will require U.S. companies to “freely innovate without burdensome regulation,” the order said.
Elsewhere in Davos, Sacks reiterated the government’s disapproval of state-level intervention. on a wednesday interview and CNBCSacks criticized California’s proposed Billionaire Wealth Tax, a one-time 5% tax on residents’ total wealth worth more than $1 billion that will be on the ballot next November.
“This is not a one-time thing, this is the first time,” said Sachs, who moved to Texas from California last month. “If they get away with it, there will be a second, a third time. It will be the beginning of something new and different in this country.”
Sacks is one of several wealthy California residents who have criticized the proposal and decided to leave the state, including Google Founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin. talking CNBCHe called the plan a potentially “terrible direction” for state overreach.
Even as Silicon Valley leaders are leaving and some AI companies have cheer As research moves closer to the sun, the Trump administration’s loosening of regulations and its no-holds-barred approach to AI development has come under criticism. Fear Automation-driven workforce effectsone financial market collapse and diffusion Potentially unsafe artificial intelligence models dampened some of the stock market’s enthusiasm for artificial intelligence.
Even some AI leaders are feeling uneasy. In November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei explain exist 60 minutes He is “deeply troubled” by the autonomous mandates AI companies are now tasked with, and said he prefers “responsible and thoughtful regulation of technology.”
Supporters tend to argue that deregulation is necessary to keep up with China’s artificial intelligence competitors. China’s artificial intelligence research is progressing rapidly narrow the gap Compared to the U.S., some models, particularly those developed by Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek, match or even transcend Performance of Western models on specific reasoning tasks.
In his conversation with Benioff, Sacks cited recent research on varying AI optimism rates around the world, publish Last year, Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence advanced this idea. The Chinese market is generally optimistic, with 83% of respondents believing that the benefits of artificial intelligence outweigh the disadvantages. By comparison, in the United States, only 39% feel optimistic.
Despite calls for an unfettered approach to artificial intelligence from the likes of Trump and Sachs, pessimism is not a strictly partisan issue in the United States. In December, former Republican presidential candidate and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis also called for More restrictions The focus is on data center construction. Last week, a bipartisan House committee heard testimony The impact of artificial intelligence on K-12 education. While some Republican committee members warned against stifling innovation through increased regulation, there was broad consensus about the possible risks of exposing children to artificial intelligence.