November 26, 2025
In December 2024 President Donald Trump named venture capitalist David O. Sacks as the "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar."
Sacks is set to guide the administration's policies for artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.
AI-researcher Gary Markus is wondering how two recent tweets by Gary Sacks relate to each other:
One theory of capitalism holds that every company should be left to their own devices, with state intervention kept a minimum. This view was well articulated just a few weeks ago, by White House AI and Crypto Czar and well-known podcaster, David O. Sacks:
David Sacks @DavidSacks - 16:52 UTC · Nov 6, 2025
There will be no federal bailout for AI. The U.S. has at least 5 major frontier model companies. If one fails, others will take its place.
The other theory of capitalism, if we can indeed call it that, holds that we should bailout important companies or industries that might overextend themselves. Quite the opposite from the above.
This latter theory, almost a form of safety-net socialism for overextended companies, seemed to be implied today, in a tweet that seemed to be laying the groundwork for bailout, by none other than... White House AI and Crypto Czar and well-known podcaster, David O. Sacks:
David Sacks @DavidSacks - 17:34 UTC · Nov 24, 2025
According to today's WSJ, AI-related investment accounts for half of GDP growth. A reversal would risk recession. We can't afford to go backwards.
The WSJ report Sacks mentions, archived here, is indeed gloomy:
The economy's dependence on AI comes with risks. Stock price/earnings ratios are near record highs. If lofty profit predictions prove wrong, share prices may tumble and investment could slow. The S&P 500 fell about 2% last week on concerns about a bubble, despite rallying 1% on Friday.
Falling stocks could trigger a reverse wealth effect: Americans would consume less, which would tend to depress sales, profits and, potentially, employment.
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If AI investment stopped growing, that could knock another 0.5 point off growth, Millar estimates. If it went to zero, that would knock a full percentage point off.
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Another risk relates to the growing scale of AI-related borrowing.
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If the revenue necessary to service that debt doesn't materialize, lenders could take a hit, spilling over into debt markets, said Berezin.
China is letting the first type of capitalism reign their Artificial Intelligence efforts:
Rather than pick winners and losers, China states the policy objective and hundreds of commercial initiatives compete using diverse strategies to fulfil the ambition. Instead of a 'winner takes all subsidies' China gets a diverse, agile, ecosystem growing in parallel to its rapidly innovative economy.
Many Chinese models are published as open source and can be run on smaller clusters.
The U.S. has however decided to let the second form of capitalism rule its AI endeavors. There are only a few companies working on large AI projects. Their models are private and blocked from scrutiny. They are promising too much and are spending a huge amount of money. They are in need of 'safety-net socialism for overextended companies'.
To provide for this the White House issued an Executive Order on:
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America's AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.
The Department of Energy is ordered to direct the initiative combining federal laboratories and 'industry partners':
Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify Federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud-based high-performance computing systems, and resources available through industry partners. The Secretary shall also identify any additional partnerships or infrastructure enhancements that could support the computational foundation for the Platform.
The federal government will of course have to pay for those private resources.
Research with the help of AI will be done in six high priority fields. The timeline provided in the Executive Order is extremely ambitious.
Besides providing the instruments for a bailout the Executive Order is also creating the means of central control over AI and its application:
If you strip away the branding, Genesis is the U.S. government building a national AI backbone inside the Department of Energy and then inviting the biggest private sector AI players to plug into it.
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But underneath, it centralizes the AI stack. Instead of letting the highest end compute and model capabilities drift entirely into the private sector, Genesis pulls them back into a structured federal environment. Access becomes conditional: follow the safety rules, share the data, integrate into the platform and you get to operate at the frontier. Don't, and you're on the outside looking in.
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Genesis is the beginning of a nationalized AI infrastructure strategy. It will function as the bridge between government compute and private sector models, letting Washington influence which companies sit closest to the frontier and which capabilities get priority. It will speed up real scientific breakthroughs, but it will also quietly define the rules of the AI race on who participates, who gets access, and how the most powerful systems are directed.
By allowing for a bailout of over extended AI companies via 'Manhattan Project' sized federal spending Trump is also attempting to prevent a stock market slump that would cost the Republicans the majority in the House.
Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.