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WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 24: (L-R) Thomas Laffont, Jacob Helberg, Michael Kratsios and David Sacks participate in the Winning the AI Race: From Strategy to Execution panel during The Hill & Valley Forum 2026 at Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium on March 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis\/Getty Images for The Hill & Valley Forum)<\/span><\/p>\n Getty Images for The Hill & Valley Forum<\/small><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former White House AI and crypto adviser to President Donald Trump, used the Memorial Day weekend to emphasize what he sees as the greater risk to U.S. technological leadership: excessive regulation rather than unchecked AI development. Sacks, who stepped down from his formal role earlier in 2026 but remains an influential voice, argued that even light-touch government oversight could hand an advantage to China in the global AI race.<\/p>\n The discussion centered on a near-miss executive order last week that would have established a voluntary framework for federal agencies to review frontier AI models before release. As reported by Politico<\/em><\/a>, Sacks intervened with a last-minute call to Trump, warning that the \u201cvoluntary\u201d process risked evolving into de facto mandatory delays that could slow American innovation.<\/p>\n Trump ultimately postponed the signing. Sacks wrote in an X post, using language that critics say overstates the competitive framing of U.S.\u2013China AI dynamics, \u201cWinning the AI race means not only beating China but also clearing bureaucratic hurdles thrown up by state legislatures and woke politicians in DC.\u201d<\/p>\n Sacks extended his commentary beyond policy to labor-market dynamics. In a widely circulated post on X over the holiday weekend, he noted, \u201cCoding has been AI\u2019s breakout use case this year. The fact that it\u2019s increased demand for software engineers \u2014 rather than decreased it \u2014 should call into question the entire \u2018AI will cause mass job loss\u2019 narrative.\u201d<\/p>\n Sacks alluded to numbers shared by GitHub COO Kyle Dangle in April. \u201cThere were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it\u2019s 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won\u2019t.),\u201d Dangle said in an X post. He continued, \u201c\u2026we’re pushing incredibly hard on more CPUs, scaling services, and strengthening GitHub\u2019s core features.\u201d<\/p>\n Sacks argues that more software means more demand for software engineers, and less regulation means more innovation.<\/p>\n<\/section>\n While Sacks\u2019s data-driven optimism has resonated with tech optimists, critics have pushed back. In a blog post<\/a> published by The London School of Economics and Political Science, Mohammad Hosseini and Laura Caroli dispute the \u201cwinning the AI race\u201d rhetoric: \u201cThe race mentality promoted in the U.S. omits the fact that China is not developing its AI strategy under a \u2018race\u2019 framing. Indeed, the race narrative has been rejected by Chinese politicians and business leaders, who seem more interested in the adoption and concrete applications of AI than in a \u2018race\u2019 against the U.S.\u201d<\/p>\n Broader analyses of the U.S.-China AI competition, such as those from Brookings Institution<\/a>, assert that while the U.S. retains a lead in frontier models and compute scale, China is advancing rapidly in areas like open-source models, efficiency improvements, and real-world application and deployment. The outcome of the \u201crace,\u201d these reports suggest, will depend not only on speed but on effective translation of AI into economic gains across society.<\/p>\nWhy Sacks Says Productivity Is Rising<\/h2>\n
Where Critics Push Back<\/h2>\n