On Wednesday, a rumor began popping up in Washington about a momentous policy change: the White House, it was said, would issue an executive order on Friday that would finally preempt state AI laws, handing over those regulatory powers to the federal government. The minute it leaked online, lawyers and policymakers began to scour every sentence of it. There was a lot about it that seemed politically unfeasible; there was even more that seemed overbroad, possibly illegal. There were a lot of agencies that had suddenly been cut out.
But crucially, they noticed how much power would have been handed to a certain South African tech-billionaire-turned-special-government-employee who’d tunneled his way into the West Wing — not Elon Musk, but the other one.
In every section of the draft order, President Donald Trump was directing his cabinet secretaries and agency heads to imminently issue reports and guidance on how to punish states with AI laws, within the next 90 days. In the Attorney General’s case, they had 30 days to establish an entire legal task force to sue those states. Every single one of them would have to consult David Sacks, the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto — and one of the most influential tech venture capitalists in the world — while executing the order.
“I don’t want to say it was a power grab. That’s too strong of a term,” said a tech policy adviser close to the White House. “But it’s definitely a consolidation, as it were, of his power.”
The MAGA universe immediately exploded, with War Room host Steve Bannon — who’d managed to help kill a previous attempt at an AI moratorium in the Senate this year — dedicating part of his Friday show to the draft order. In Congress, Democrats revolted publicly; tech-skeptical Republicans were quietly preparing their statements. The AI policy world immediately issued reports illustrating how much power would have been sucked into the hands of the White House. The order had been scheduled to be signed on Friday — and then it never was.
Outside the White House, the AI executive order, had it been signed, would have been legally unenforceable. But inside the White House, it would have been treated as an imperial mandate. Trump’s executive orders are historically designed to force his underlings to get his will done immediately, legality be damned, and the fallout tends to be irreversible by the time that the courts find his actions illegal. His tariff order, for instance, may soon be overturned by the Supreme Court, but not before causing trillions in economic losses and damaging the US’s international relationships.
Asked for comment, the White House press office email run by Karoline Leavitt refused to comment on the record, instead only insistently asking us to name our sources.
And from there, it would have been used as a threat against the states. “I suspect that if it’s effective, the most effective part of it will be having a chilling effect on state legislation,” Charlie Bullock, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Law and AI, told The Verge. One section of the draft would have allowed the government to pull any federal funding from states in violation of the order — not just rural broadband grants, which had been used as leverage in previous preemption fights, but anything from highway funds to education grants. “Even if [a state] can win a court case to make them give them that funding eventually, it would take a long time. States might be convinced by that.”
As such, it would have turned Sacks into the US’s AI policy gatekeeper in one fell swoop.
Though there are several White House officials with ties to the tech industry, Sacks, who has a provisional government employment status, is seen by Washington insiders as Trump’s closest conduit with the big-name tech CEOs, who consider him as a peer. (Though Vice President JD Vance did work in Silicon Valley prior to politics, he never did break into the three-comma club.)
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