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 who 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 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 Sanders’ call last month for a moratorium on data center construction.
“If we have 1,200 different AI laws in the states, you know, clamping down on innovation, I worry that we could lose the AI race,” Sacks told Benioff.
In the year since he took office, Trump has taken a distinctly free-market stance on AI development. In an AI Action Plan released last summer, the administration dismantled many regulations concerning AI research, a reversal from Biden-era norms that promoted a whole-of-government approach with federal involvement in AI governance. Trump took it a step further in December, with an executive order that further weakened state-level guardrails for AI development. Global AI dominance, the order said, would require American companies to be “free to innovate without cumbersome regulation.”
Sacks reiterated the administration’s disapproval of state-level interventions elsewhere at Davos, too. In a Wednesday interview with CNBC, Sacks criticized California’s proposed billionaire wealth tax, a one-time, 5% tax on total wealth for residents worth more than $1 billion, which will be on the ballot next November.
“It’s not a one-time, it’s a first time,” said Sacks, who moved from California to Texas last month. “And if they get away with it, there’ll be a second time and a third time. And this will be the beginning of something new and different in this country.”
Sacks is one of several wealthy California residents who have criticized the proposal and decided to leave the state, including Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Speaking to CNBC, he referred to the plan as a potentially “scary direction” of state overreach.
Despite the Silicon Valley leaders’ departures, and the fact that some AI companies have cheered the Trump administration’s regulatory loosening, the no-holds-barred approach to AI development has also come under fire as research flies ever closer to the Sun. Fears of automation-driven labor effects, a financial markets collapse and the proliferation of potentially unsafe AI models have dampened some of the stock market’s AI enthusiasm.
Even some AI leaders are uneasy. In November, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on 60 Minutes that he was “deeply uncomfortable” with how AI companies were now being tasked with self-governing, saying he preferred “responsible and thoughtful regulation of the technology.”
Advocates tend to justify deregulation as necessary to keep pace with AI competitors in China. China’s AI research is rapidly closing the gap with the U.S., as some models, most prominently those developed by the Hangzhou-based startup DeepSeek, are matching or even surpassing the performance of Western models in specific reasoning tasks.
In his conversation with Benioff, Sacks cited recent research on varying AI optimism rates around the world, published last year by Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Optimism reigned in China, where 83% of survey respondents saw AI as more beneficial than harmful. In the U.S., by contrast, only 39% felt as optimistic.
But while figures like Trump and Sacks call for an AI approach free of restraints, pessimism is not a strictly partisan issue in the U.S. In December, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, a former GOP presidential hopeful, also called for more limits to be placed on data center construction. And last week, a bipartisan House committee heard testimonies on the impact of AI in K-12 education. While some Republican committee members cautioned against hindering innovation through more regulation, broad consensus was found on the possible risks of exposing children to AI.
