David Sacks Sounds Alarm Over Democrats' Most Terrifying Censorship Plan Yet

David Sacks Sounds Alarm Over Democrats' Most Terrifying Censorship Plan Yet David Sacks, who stepped down as President Trump's AI and crypto czar in March, says it's "100%" that the Democrats who just won Congress will make a major push for AI legislation, and that the end state is "a surveillance and censorship state that's turbocharged by superintelligence."

Sacks was answering co-host Jason Calacanis on the All-In podcast released Nov. 7. Calacanis asked for odds on a scenario co-host David Friedberg had laid out, in which only the government can use the tools. Sacks said he didn't think it would go that far, then laid out the road map he does expect: "You create a department, a federal department of AI. You require that all the so-called frontier models have to be reviewed and approved by that."

"The regulators give their notes on it. You can't get a model released unless you address their concerns," Sacks said. Those concerns, in his telling, would be "disinformation and misinformation and dissonant thought" - "all the things that the government was pressuring the social media companies to crack down on and censor during COVID."

"They're going to basically reenact that whole regime again using AI. And it's going to be infinitely more powerful because we're talking about superintelligence here," Sacks said. "So I do believe that that is the regime that we're headed towards."

David Sacks predicts Democrats will use AI legislation and frontier-model approvals to create a surveillance and censorship state 'turbocharged by superintelligence'

"It's 100% that Democrats are going to make a major push for AI legislation in the next Congress. The question is... https://t.co/QQ0aASM7gX pic.twitter.com/x1WJMipb4i

The warning came four days after Democrats swept the midterms. According to Reuters , Democrats plan a wave of AI and data-center bills when they take control in January , among them a push by Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) to have independent experts test leading AI models against safety standards and rules on when AI companies can be held liable for harm. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) has promised hearings and "reasonable guardrails on AI," accusing Trump and congressional Republicans of a "conscious decision" to "let the AI industry run wild."

Michigan's Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed ran on something close to the department Sacks describes. His campaign's "AI Under Control" plan calls for "A Cabinet-Level, Independent AI Safety Agency," which it sums up as "One agency with the power to inspect labs, block releases, and order a pause or command a shutdown." When he released it in October, El-Sayed said , "At an absolute minimum, I'm calling for a pause in AI frontier development."

Before the election, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) were already negotiating a bipartisan bill, as we reported in September. Negotiators aim to give the US government "the power to block the release of certain AI models that are deemed unsafe," Reuters reported, with companies able to challenge that decision in federal court. In the House, Lieu and Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-Texas) filed an AI Kill Switch Act that would let the Homeland Security secretary order AI products throttled, suspended or shut down, as we noted in July.

Trump's own Commerce Department knocked two frontier models offline in June. A national-security directive from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick's office cut off foreign nationals' access to Anthropic's Fable 5 and Mythos 5 on June 12; unable to check users' citizenship, the company blocked everyone, after what it says was about 90 minutes' warning and no specifics, as we reported . Sacks made the administration's case the next day, saying "the ball is in Anthropic's court."

I've had a number of conversations with folks inside and outside government about the current situation with Anthropic, and here is what I believe to be true:

- As we know, Anthropic publicly released its Mythos class models earlier this week under the commercial name Fable....

Access came back about three weeks later, after Lutnick said Commerce had "worked closely with Anthropic to analyze and approve Fable 5 to ensure alignment across the US Government," as we reported . Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had also helped develop a plan for a FINRA-style regulator, reporting to the SEC, that would "vet the safety" of AI models, according to a July report .

Sacks has accused Democrats before of plotting to push "woke AI" through state laws. As czar, he told Fox Business last December, "We don't like seeing blue states trying to insert their woke ideology in AI models, and we really want to try and stop that," and said Colorado's ban on "algorithmic discrimination," which makes AI developers liable for a model's "disparate impact," "raises very serious First Amendment concerns."

Alphabet put the COVID pressure he points to on the record in September 2025, calling the Biden administration's pressure over content "unacceptable and wrong" in a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, according to the committee , and offering creators banned over COVID and election speech a way back onto YouTube, as we reported .

Trump can veto whatever the new Congress sends him, and overriding him takes two-thirds of both chambers. "The probability of legislation is much higher than people anticipate," Raymond James analyst Ed Mills told Reuters, noting that Democrats could try to attach AI rules to routine must-pass bills.