"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."
https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/829179/david-sacks-ai-executive-order