Category: AI moratorium

When Viceroy David Sacks Writes the Tariffs: How One VC Could Weaponize U.S. Trade Against the EU

David Sacks is a “Special Government Employee”, Silicon Valley insider and a PayPal mafioso who has become one of the most influential “unofficial” architects of AI policy under the Trump administration. No confirmation hearings, no formal role—but direct access to power.

He:
– Hosts influential political podcasts with Musk and Thiel-aligned narratives.
– Coordinates behind closed doors with elite AI companies who are now PRC-style “national champions” (OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir).
– Has reportedly played a central role in shaping the AI Executive Orders and industrial strategy driving billions in public infrastructure to favored firms.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 202(a), a Special Government Employee is:

  • Temporarily retained to perform limited government functions,
  • For no more than 130 days per year (which for Sacks ends either April 14 or May 30, 2025), unless reappointed in a different role,
  • Typically serves in an advisory or consultative role, or
  • Without holding actual decision-making or operational authority over federal programs or agencies.

SGEs are used to avoid conflict-of-interest entanglements for outside experts while still tapping their expertise for advisory purposes. They are not supposed to wield sweeping executive power or effectively run a government program. Yeah, right.

And like a good little Silicon Valley weasel, Sacks supposedly is alternating between his DC side hustle and his VC office to stay under 130 days. This is a dumbass reading of the statute which says “‘Special Government employee’ means… any officer or employee…retained, designated, appointed, or employed…to perform…temporary duties… for not more than 130 days during any period of 365 consecutive days.” That’s not the same as “worked” 130 days on the time card punch. But oh well.

David Sacks has already exceeded the legal boundaries of his appointment as a Special Government Employee (SGE) both in time served but also by directing the implementation of a sweeping, whole-of-government AI policy, including authoring executive orders, issuing binding directives to federal agencies, and coordinating interagency enforcement strategies—actions that plainly constitute executive authority reserved for duly appointed officers under the Appointments Clause. As an SGE, Sacks is authorized only to provide temporary, nonbinding advice, not to exercise operational control or policy-setting discretion across the federal government. Accordingly, any executive actions taken at his direction or based on his advisement are constitutionally infirm as the unlawful product of an individual acting without valid authority, and must be deemed void as “fruit of the poisonous tree.”

Of course, one of the states that the Trump AI Executive Orders will collide with almost immediately is the European Union and its EU AI Act. Were they 51st? No that’s Canada. 52nd? Ah, right that’s Greenland. Must be 53rd.

How Could David Sacks Weaponize Trade Policy to Help His Constituents in Silicon Valley?

Here’s the playbook:

Engineer Executive Orders

Through his demonstrated access to Trump and senior White House officials, Sacks could promote executive orders under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) or Section 301 of the Trade Act, aimed at punishing countries (like EU members) for “unfair restrictions” on U.S. AI exports or operations.

Something like this: “The European Union’s AI Act constitutes a discriminatory and protectionist measure targeting American AI innovation, and materially threatens U.S. national security and technological leadership.” I got your moratorium right here.

Leverage the USTR as a Blunt Instrument

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) can initiate investigations under Section 301 without needing new laws. All it takes is political will—and a nudge from someone like Viceroy Sacks—to argue that the EU’s AI Act discriminates against U.S. firms. See Canada’s “Tech Tax”. Gee, I wonder if Viceroy Sacks had anything to do with that one.

Redefine “National Security”

Sacks and his allies can exploit the Trump administration’s loose definition of “national security” claiming that restricting U.S. AI firms in Europe endangers critical defense and intelligence capabilities.

Smear Campaigns and Influence Operations

Sacks could launch more public campaigns against the EU like his attacks on the AI diffusion rule. According to the BBC, “Mr. Sacks cited the alienation of allies as one of his key arguments against the AI diffusion plan”. That’s a nice ally you got there, be a shame if something happened to it.

After all, the EU AI Act does what Sacks despises like protects artists and consumers, restricts deployment of high-risk AI systems (like facial recognition and social scoring), requires documentation of training data (which exposes copyright violations), and applies extraterritorially (meaning U.S. firms must comply even at home).

And don’t forget, Viceroy Sacks actually was given a portfolio that at least indirectly includes the National Security Council, so he can use the NATO connection to put a fine edge on his “industrial patriotism” just as war looms over Europe.

When Policy Becomes Personal

In a healthy democracy, trade retaliation should be guided by evidence, public interest, and formal process.

But under the current setup, someone like David Sacks can short-circuit the system—turning a private grievance into a national trade war. He’s already done it to consumers, wrongful death claims and copyright, why not join war lords like Eric Schmidt and really jack with people? Like give deduplication a whole new meaning.

When one man’s ideology becomes national policy, it’s not just bad governance.

It’s a broligarchy in real time.

Beyond Standard Oil: How the AI Action Plan Made America a Command Economy for Big Tech That You Will Pay For

When the White House requested public comments earlier this year on how the federal government should approach artificial intelligence, thousands of Americans—ranging from scientists to artists, labor leaders to civil liberties advocates—responded with detailed recommendations. Yet when America’s AI Action Plan was released today, it became immediately clear that those voices were largely ignored. The plan reads less like a response to public input and more like a pre-written blueprint drafted in collaboration with the very corporations it benefits. The priorities, language, and deregulatory thrust suggest that the real consultations happened behind closed doors—with Big Tech executives, not the American people.

In other words, business as usual.

By any historical measure—Standard Oil, AT&T, or even the Cold War military-industrial complex—the Trump Administration’s “America’s AI Action Plan” represents a radical leap toward a command economy built for and by Big Tech. Only this time, there are no rate regulations, no antitrust checks, and no public obligations—just streamlined subsidies, deregulation, and federally orchestrated dominance by a handful of private AI firms.

“Frontier Labs” as National Champions

The plan doesn’t pretend to be neutral. It picks winners—loudly. Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are effectively crowned as “national champions,” entrusted with developing the frontier of artificial intelligence on behalf of the American state.

– The National AI Research Resource (NAIRR) and National Science Foundation partnerships funnel taxpayer-funded compute and talent into these firms.
– Federal procurement standards now require models that align with “American values,” but only as interpreted by government-aligned vendors.
– These companies will receive priority access to compute in a national emergency, hard-wiring them into the national security apparatus.
– Meanwhile, so-called “open” models will be encouraged in name only—no requirement for training data transparency, licensing, or reproducibility.

This is not a free market. This is national champion industrial policy—without the regulation or public equity ownership that historically came with it.

Infrastructure for Them, Not Us

The Action Plan reads like a wishlist from Silicon Valley’s executive suites:

– Federal lands are being opened up for AI data centers and energy infrastructure.
– Environmental and permitting laws are gutted to accelerate construction of facilities for private use.
– A national electrical grid expansion is proposed—not to serve homes and public transportation, but to power hyperscaler GPUs for model training.
– There’s no mention of public access, community benefit, or rural deployment. This is infrastructure built with public expense for private use.

Even during the era of Ma Bell, the public got universal service and price caps. Here? The public is asked to subsidize the buildout and then stand aside.

Deregulation for the Few, Discipline for the Rest

The Plan explicitly orders:
– Rescission of Biden-era safety and equity requirements.
– Reviews of FTC investigations to shield AI firms from liability.
– Withholding of federal AI funding from states that attempt to regulate the technology for safety, labor, or civil rights purposes.

Meanwhile, these same companies are expected to supply the military, detect cyberattacks, run cloud services for federal agencies, and set speech norms in government systems.

The result? An unregulated cartel tasked with executing state functions.

More Extreme Than Standard Oil or AT&T

Let’s be clear: Standard Oil was broken up. AT&T had to offer regulated universal service. Lockheed, Raytheon, and the Cold War defense contractors were overseen by procurement auditors and GAO enforcement.

This new AI economy is more privatized than any prior American industrial model—yet more dependent on the federal government than ever before. It’s an inversion of free market principles wrapped in American flags and GPU clusters.

Welcome to the Command Economy—For Tech Oligarchs

There’s a word for this: command economy. But instead of bureaucrats in Soviet ministries, we now have a handful of unelected CEOs directing infrastructure, energy, science, education, national security, and labor policy—all through cozy relationships with federal agencies.

If we’re going to nationalize AI, let’s do it honestly—with public governance, democratic accountability, and shared benefit. But this halfway privatized, fully subsidized, and wholly unaccountable structure isn’t capitalism. It’s capture.

AI Needs Ever More Electricity—And Google Wants Us to Pay for It

Uncle Sugar’s “National Emergency” Pitch to Congress

At a recent Congressional hearing, former Google CEO Eric “Uncle Sugar” Schmidt delivered a message that was as jingoistic as it was revealing: if America wants to win the AI arms race, it better start building power plants. Fast. But the subtext was even clearer—he expects the taxpayer to foot the bill because, you know, the Chinese Communist Party. Yes, when it comes to fighting the Red Menace, the all-American boys in Silicon Valley will stand ready to fight to the last Ukrainian, or Taiwanese, or even Texan.

Testifying before the House Energy & Commerce Committee on April 9, Schmidt warned that AI’s natural limit isn’t chips—it’s electricity. He projected that the U.S. would need 92 gigawatts of new generation capacity—the equivalent of nearly 100 nuclear reactors—to keep up with AI demand.

Schmidt didn’t propose that Google, OpenAI, Meta, or Microsoft pay for this themselves, just like they didn’t pay for broadband penetration. No, Uncle Sugar pushed for permitting reform, federal subsidies, and government-driven buildouts of new energy infrastructure. In plain English? He wants the public sector to do the hard and expensive work of generating the electricity that Big Tech will profit from.

Will this Improve the Grid?

And let’s not forget: the U.S. electric grid is already dangerously fragile. It’s aging, fragmented, and increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, and even extreme weather events. Pouring public money into ultra-centralized AI data infrastructure—without first securing the grid itself—is like building a mansion on a cracked foundation.

If we are going to incur public debt, we should prioritize resilience, distributed energy, grid security, and community-level reliability—not a gold-plated private infrastructure buildout for companies that already have trillion-dollar valuations.

Big Tech’s Growing Appetite—and Private Hoarding

This isn’t just a future problem. The data center buildout is already in full swing and your Uncle Sugar must be getting nervous about where he’s going to get the money from to run his AI and his autonomous drone weapons. In Oregon, where electricity is famously cheap thanks to the Bonneville Power Administration’s hydroelectric dams on the Columbia River, tech companies have quietly snapped up huge portions of the grid’s output. What was once a shared public benefit—affordable, renewable power—is now being monopolized by AI compute farms whose profits leave the region to the bank accounts in Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is investing in a nuclear-powered data center next to the defunct Three Mile Island reactor—but again, it’s not about public benefit. It’s about keeping Azure’s training workloads running 24/7. And don’t expect them to share any of that power capacity with the public—or even with neighboring hospitals, schools, or communities.

Letting the Public Build Private Fortresses

The real play here isn’t just to use public power—it’s to get the public to build the power infrastructure, and then seal it off for proprietary use. Moats work both ways.

That includes:
– Publicly funded transmission lines across hundreds of miles to deliver power to remote server farms;
– Publicly subsidized generation capacity (nuclear, gas, solar, hydro—you name it);
– And potentially, prioritized access to the grid that lets AI workloads run while the rest of us face rolling blackouts during heatwaves.

All while tech giants don’t share their models, don’t open their training data, and don’t make their outputs public goods. It’s a privatized extractive model, powered by your tax dollars.

Been Burning for Decades

Don’t forget: Google and YouTube have already been burning massive amounts of electricity for 20 years. It didn’t start with ChatGPT or Gemini. Serving billions of search queries, video streams, and cloud storage events every day requires a permanent baseload—yet somehow this sudden “AI emergency” is being treated like a surprise, as if nobody saw it coming.

If they knew this was coming (and they did), why didn’t they build the power? Why didn’t they plan for sustainability? Why is the public now being told it’s our job to fix their bottleneck?

The Cold War Analogy—Flipped on Its Head

Some industry advocates argue that breaking up Big Tech or slowing AI infrastructure would be like disarming during a new Cold War with China. But Gail Slater, the Assistant Attorney General leading the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, pushed back forcefully—not at a hearing, but on the War Room podcast.

In that interview, Slater recalled how AT&T tried to frame its 1980s breakup as a national security threat, arguing it would hurt America’s Cold War posture. But the DOJ did it anyway—and it led to an explosion of innovation in wireless technology.

“AT&T said, ‘You can’t do this. We are a national champion. We are critical to this country’s success. We will lose the Cold War if you break up AT&T,’ in so many words. … Even so, [the DOJ] moved forward … America didn’t lose the Cold War, and … from that breakup came a lot of competition and innovation.”

“I learned that in order to compete against China, we need to be in all these global races the American way. And what I mean by that is we’ll never beat China by becoming more like China. China has national champions, they have a controlled economy, et cetera, et cetera.

We win all these races and history has taught by our free market system, by letting the ball rip, by letting companies compete, by innovating one another. And the reason why antitrust matters to that picture, to the free market system is because we’re the cop on the beat at the end of the day. We step in when competition is not working and we ensure that markets remain competitive.”

Slater’s message was clear: regulation and competition enforcement are not threats to national strength—they’re prerequisites to it. So there’s no way that the richest corporations in commercial history should be subsidized by the American taxpayer.

Bottom Line: It’s Public Risk, Private Reward

Let’s be clear:

– They want the public to bear the cost of new electricity generation.
– They want the public to underwrite transmission lines.
– They want the public to streamline regulatory hurdles.
– And they plan to privatize the upside, lock down the infrastructure, keep their models secret and socialize the investment risk.

This isn’t a public-private partnership. It’s a one-way extraction scheme. America needs a serious conversation about energy—but it shouldn’t begin with asking taxpayers to bail out the richest companies in commercial history.

David Sacks Is Learning That the States Still Matter

For a moment, it looked like the tech world’s powerbrokers had pulled it off. Buried deep in a Republican infrastructure and tax package was a sleeper provision — the so-called AI moratorium — that would have blocked states from passing their own AI laws for up to a decade. It was an audacious move: centralize control over one of the most consequential technologies in history, bypass 50 state legislatures, and hand the reins to a small circle of federal agencies and especially to tech industry insiders.

But then it collapsed.

The Senate voted 99–1 to strike the moratorium. Governors rebelled. Attorneys general sounded the alarm. Artists, parents, workers, and privacy advocates from across the political spectrum said “no.” Even hardline conservatives like Ted Cruz eventually reversed course when it came down to the final vote. The message to Big Tech or the famous “Little Tech” was clear: the states still matter — and America’s tech elite ignore that at their peril.  (“Little Tech” is the latest rhetorical deflection promoted by Big Tech aka propaganda.)

The old Google crowd pushed the moratorium–their fingerprints were obvious. Having gotten fabulously rich off of their two favorites: The DMCA farce and the Section 230 shakedown. But there’s increasing speculation that White House AI Czar and Silicon Valley Viceroy David Sacks, PayPal alum and vocal MAGA-world player, was calling the ball. If true, that makes this defeat even more revealing.

Sacks represents something of a new breed of power-hungry tech-right influencer — part of the emerging “Red Tech” movement that claims to reject woke capitalism and coastal elitism but still wants experts to shape national policy from Silicon Valley, a chapter straight out of Philip Dru: Administrator. Sacks is tied to figures like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and a growing network of Trump-aligned venture capitalists. But even that alignment couldn’t save the moratorium.

Why? Because the core problem wasn’t left vs. right. It was top vs. bottom.

In 1964, Ronald Reagan’s classic speech called A Time for Choosing warned about “a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capitol” deciding what’s best for everyone else. That warning still rings true — except now the “capitol” might just be a server farm in Menlo Park or a podcast studio in LA.

The AI moratorium was an attempt to govern by preemption and fiat, not by consent. And the backlash wasn’t partisan. It came from red states and blue ones alike — places where elected leaders still think they have the right to protect their citizens from unregulated surveillance, deepfakes, data scraping, and economic disruption.

So yes, the defeat of the moratorium was a blow to Google’s strategy of soft-power dominance. But it was also a shot across the bow for David Sacks and the would-be masters of tech populism. You can’t have populism without the people.

If Sacks and his cohort want to play a long game in AI policy, they’ll have to do more than drop ideas into the policy laundry of think tank white papers and Beltway briefings. They’ll need to win public trust, respect state sovereignty, and remember that governing by sneaky safe harbors is no substitute for legitimacy.  

The moratorium failed because it presumed America could be governed like a tech startup — from the top, at speed, with no dissent. Turns out the country is still under the impression they have something to say about how they are governed, especially by Big Tech.