America could ‘lose the AI race’ because of too much ‘pessimism,’ White House AI czar David Sacks says

The race for artificial intelligence supremacy has pitted Silicon Valley bigwigs against Washington policymakers and Chinese competitors. President Donald Trump has taken a deregulatory approach to AI development, at times flying in the face of criticisms advocating improved safety infrastructure, an argument that the administration’s leading technology advisor has equated to a willful abandonment of the race for AI dominance.

The so-called AI doomer mindset—a viewpoint that unconstrained AI will eventually amount to a net negative for humanity, potentially even causing societal collapse—amounts to a “self-inflicted injury” on behalf of the U.S., according to David Sacks, a longtime technology investor whom Trump installed as his AI and crypto czar.

“We generally see that in Western countries, the AI optimism is a lot lower,” Sacks said Wednesday during a conversation with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. To Sacks’ point, the long-running Edelman Trust Barometer featured the striking finding that Americans were more pessimistic about AI than most of the world in 2025.

Sacks said that he fears a “fit of pessimism” stemming from an overregulatory approach to AI development, including Sen. Bernie San...