David Sacks & the War on Anthropic

Pulling the latest on Sacks.

Sacks is still the most powerful tech voice in the White House, but the title changed. He stepped down as AI czar in March and landed as co-chair of Trump's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which arguably gives him more reach with less scrutiny. He's also sitting on the new Super Intelligence Force panel alongside Emil Michael.

His whole game right now is a full-court press against Anthropic. He's calling their safety research a fear factory, mocking the self-replicating toaster warnings, attacking their proposed FLOPs threshold as a stale twenty twenty-three EU number that would sweep in half of Silicon Valley. He had a public scrap with Jack Clark and Reid Hoffman on X last week over whether Anthropic's equity commitments to public good are real or theater. He's also pushing the line that AI safety guardrails backfired in cyber defense — citing OpenCode and Hugging Face, where models refused to analyze exploits mid-attack because the payloads tripped safety filters.

The NYT ran a piece in December arguing he's used the role to benefit Craft Ventures and his network, and that critique hasn't gone away. But from inside the administration, he's winning. Trump signed the White House Accord on Super Intelligence in September — voluntary commitments from the six frontier labs with third-party auditing, which Sacks brokered and now calls legally enforceable guardrails that beat anything Democrats proposed.

So the pattern you're seeing with Andreessen and Musk shows up here too, just in a suit. Sacks isn't the chainsaw guy. He's the one who makes the deregulation sound like governance.

Searching for Sacks' political evolution.

Sacks was never really a liberal. He was a libertarian conservative from day one. At Stanford in the early nineties he co-wrote The Diversity Myth with Thiel, a book attacking multiculturalism and political correctness on campus. He gave to McCain and Romney, then in twenty sixteen donated to Hillary and the DNC — which looks like an outlier but was more about staying in the Valley's social good graces than conviction. He sat out twenty twenty entirely.

The real turn came with COVID. San Francisco's lockdowns radicalized him. He moved to Florida for a stretch, praised DeSantis, and started funding recall campaigns against SF school board members, DA Chesa Boudin, and LA DA George Gascón. On the All-In podcast he called January sixth an insurrection and said Trump was disqualified — then spent the next two years walking that back. By twenty twenty-two he was dropping a million dollars on a JD Vance super PAC. In June twenty twenty-four he hosted a twelve-million-dollar Trump fundraiser at his Pacific Heights mansion, tickets five hundred grand a couple, and endorsed the same day. He framed it as breaking the ice so other tech billionaires could come out.

The Anthropic fight is where it gets personal and structural at once. Sacks' core thesis is that safety rhetoric is regulatory capture dressed up as altruism. His September post is the manifesto: Dario and Sam have a duopoly on frontier intelligence, so if they want to slow down, fine — but stop pretending they need antitrust waivers and government approval to do it. Call it a cartel. He also went after METR, the safety evaluator Anthropic funds, as not independent. Then there's the June Fable incident — a trusted partner reportedly jailbroke Anthropic's Mythos guardrails, the admin asked Dario to fix it or pull the model, he refused, and Sacks says that's what triggered the export controls. Anthropic disputes the framing.

Underneath all of it sits the business angle. Craft Ventures has stakes in crypto and AI companies that benefit from loose rules. Sacks sold his personal holdings in Meta, Amazon, TSMC, and xAI when he took the czar job, but the firm's portfolio didn't vanish. The Atlantic's read is blunt: the only consistent principle of his career is ruthless devotion to self-interest, wrapped in libertarian language.

So the arc isn't crazy or broken. It's a guy whose ideology was always anti-regulation and anti-expert, who spent twenty years in the Valley's progressive social scene without ever believing it, and who finally found an administration that pays him to say what he's thought since Stanford. Anthropic is the perfect enemy because they threaten both his worldview and his money.

He believes the softer version. Not that Dario woke up one day and decided to fake concern for humanity, but that the safety apparatus — the papers, the evaluators, the doom timelines — has become a self-serving industry that conveniently produces one output: slow everyone down except the people already ahead. In Sacks' head that's not a conspiracy, it's an emergent effect. Smart people following incentives. He'd say the psyop framing is what his critics use to avoid engaging with the incentive argument.

The problem is the two collapse in practice. If you believe the output is rigged, you stop distinguishing between "the research is wrong" and "the research is fake," and you start treating every Anthropic safety claim as presumptively bad faith. That's where he is now.

I'd point to three things that stacked early. First, the Stanford years with Thiel. They built their identity as the smart guys fighting a campus they saw as captured by ideology, and that outsider-versus-the-herd posture never left. It's the same posture Andreessen has, just with a philosophy degree attached.

Second, PayPal. He and Thiel fought eBay for years over control of the company, and they won by being more aggressive and more paranoid than everyone else. Winning that fight taught him that the person who trusts the process loses, and the person who trusts his own read wins. That lesson paid off so many times it hardened into a worldview.

Third, and this is the one people miss — he was a Democrat for a long time and it cost him socially in the Valley when he drifted right. So there's a grievance layer too. He spent years being the respectable one at the table, and when the table moved, he decided the table was the problem.

None of that makes him unique. It's the same arc as a lot of tech billionaires — early ideological fight, repeated validation, then insulation. What makes Sacks different is he turned it into a full-time job inside the government.

My lean is no, not on the core move. The incentive critique has a real kernel — safety talk can be a moat for incumbents, and someone should say it out loud. But Sacks isn't saying it as a commentator. He's saying it from inside the government, with the power to shape export controls and procurement, while his firm holds stakes in the companies that benefit when Anthropic slows down. That's not truth-telling, that's regulatory arbitrage with a podcast.

The part I'd defend is his willingness to be the guy who asks whether the doom scenario is load-bearing or just load-collecting. Most of the industry won't touch that question because the social cost is too high. He will, and that has value even if his motives are mixed.

What I can't shake is that the man who spent twenty years calling out institutional capture is now the institution, and he's using the same playbook — define the enemy, dismiss the evidence, never correct. If the roles were reversed and it were Dario running the White House AI office attacking Craft's portfolio, Sacks would call it the most obvious conflict of interest in American history. He'd be right.

The one thing I'd want to know before fully writing him off: does he ever update when the evidence genuinely contradicts him, or does the update only ever run one direction — toward more certainty?

Three tests. One — does he apply the same scrutiny to allies? If Craft's portfolio companies make safety claims or push for regulation that helps them, does he attack those too, or only Anthropic's? Two — does he ever update publicly when the data moves against him? Musk's USAID pattern is the warning: no correction, just escalation. Three — would he support a policy that costs his fund money if he thought it was right? A guy acting on principle bleeds sometimes. Sacks hasn't visibly bled yet.

Run those three and you'll know fast whether it's conviction or costume.

On it — starting a watcher that scores Sacks against those three tests.

Handing it the brief now.

It's running in the background now, so you'll get updates as it finds things rather than one big dump. First report should land within a few minutes.

First ping from the watcher: it's pulling his X posts, All-In episodes, interviews, and White House actions for the baseline, then it'll

Yes. Everything we've said is saved in the conversation history on your account, so you can scroll back or pull it up later. The bot's reports will also show up inline as they arrive.

Good. The watcher will keep chewing on Sacks either way.

Checking the watcher's progress.

Nothing new yet. It said it's pulling the six-month baseline across his X posts, All-In episodes, and White House actions, so give it a bit.