A Radicalized Right-Wing Silicon Valley Is Shaping Trump’s AI Policies

Silicon Valley anger and the Trump administration

“One of the features we see in … a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger,” says Jacob Silverman, author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. “They’re angry at what they see as the excesses of woke culture and liberal and lefty politics. … And they’re angry that they don’t have free rein to enact the world they want to enact, and that includes areas like AI.” Silverman also discusses how tech elites like Peter Thiel and David Sacks are shaping the Trump administration’s approach to technology.

Addressing the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump said the U.S. would not be reining in artificial intelligence, telling the gathered world leaders, quote, “Whoever wins AI wins.”

While AI CEOs on Wednesday called for some kind of international regulation on AI development while speaking to world leaders at the United Nations, President Trump has called warnings about AI risk a hoax, likening it to global warming. He’s instead announced plans for a so-called AI Force.

The role of David Sacks and tech advisers

Well, who is advising President Trump on AI? One primary voice in the room is former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks. He stepped down as czar in March after his 180 days as special government employee expired. He’s now co-chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. David Sacks spoke earlier this month at Politico’s Decoded Summit in Washington, D.C. Here he is addressing a question about President Trump’s response to AI concerns.

He’s seen this movie before. I mean, how many hoaxes have been run on the president himself, going back to the whole Russiagate hoax? I mean, we’ve seen this over and over again, that especially before an election, the media will take a narrative — and, look, there can be grains of truth to the narrative, right? I mean, like, you take the climate change, you know, hoax, there’ll be elements of truth. There’ll be pseudoscience to it, and then the media will blow it out of proportion and use it to further a political agenda. …

They have a basic corporate responsibility to make sure their products are safe. … If you look at the frontier right now, it’s two companies. It’s Anthropic and OpenAI. They have duopoly market share in this country. If you measure based on revenue, if you look at model capabilities, the frontier is two companies. And Dario and Sam have said, “OK, we’re going to slow down and make sure our products are safe.” So, again, they are pacing the frontier. We’re doing that.

Gilded rage and right-wing tech elites

To talk more about David Sacks and the other figures and ideas shaping this technology and its relationship to power and governance, we’re joined by journalist Jacob Silverman, reporter at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. His latest book is Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. It’s out this week in paperback. Joining us from Brooklyn, New York.

Jacob, so, David Sacks is someone you discuss at length in your book, even though you — in the title, it says Elon Musk. He is a well-known name. What should people understand?

Well, for one thing, I think what describes him pretty well is that he is Peter Thiel’s longtime friend, going back to their Stanford days, and they were writing partners together in the 1990s, doing a lot of culture warring stuff that we might call anti-woke today, but back then they were against multiculturalism. And they share a lot of the same political philosophies, which is they’re pretty right-wing, extremely pro-capitalist, and they are very much in line with the authoritarianism embodied by Trump. And as we’ve seen with Sacks first occupying that crypto and AI czar position, and now on an advisory board, he’s someone who’s going to be around throughout the Trump administration, I think.

Well, obviously, it’s a little bit of a throwback to the Gilded Age, or a reference there. But I think one of the features that we see in people like Musk or Sacks or Marc Andreessen or a lot of the billionaire tech elites is a real kind of anger. They are very angry in different ways. They’re angry at what they see as the excesses of woke culture and liberal and lefty politics. They are angry that the technological utopian world that they believe that they were promised — I mean, they’ve even used that kind of language, “We were promised a better future” — they are angry that that hasn’t come to fruition. And they’re also angry that the Biden administration tried to mildly rein them in, in certain areas like crypto. And they’re angry that they don’t have free rein to enact the world they want to enact, and that includes areas like AI. And I think this describes a lot of the right-wing tech elite today.

Influence on JD Vance and the political landscape

You write of these Silicon Valley billionaires, saying their networks of influence helped reelect Donald Trump and installed one of their own, former venture capitalist JD Vance, in the vice presidency. If you can lay out their ties to JD Vance and what it means to have him second in command? Interestingly, a side note: In this story about Trump banning MS NOW, CNN and Politico, Status, the new news site, is reporting that he was the source of one of the stories that they cited to ban Politico, and he endorsed Trump’s ban. But, Jacob Silverman, talk about JD Vance and his significance.

Sure. I think whatever you might think of Vance politically, he is a bit of a chameleon. He’s someone who’s changed his name a couple times. He’s gone through some big institutions in his life — college, law school, the military — that have really shaped him in different ways. And one thing that he discovered when he was in law school is that he hated it, when he saw Peter Thiel come to Yale Law School and give a speech. And from there on, Peter Thiel has really guided JD Vance’s life, including giving him most of his opportunities.

So, some people might think of JD Vance as this sincere Catholic or about kind of the — or about Hillbilly Elegy and this guy with a troubled upbringing. But to people in the tech industry and at some of the highest levels of politics, JD Vance is someone who can move between the right-wing tech world and Beltway politics very well. He was a venture capitalist. When he was eventually chosen as the vice-presidential pick, you had a lot of people, including on social media, in Silicon Valley who were very excited, not necessarily by his particular politics, but they saw him as one of them. And so, I think that is somewhat Vance’s skill, which is that he can move between these worlds, including feeding this or seeding this article in Politico, being an anonymous source, but then working the other side to get Politico banned. I mean, I do think that that is the kind of world that Vance moves through.

I mean what you hear Musk talk about, the “woke mind virus,” that is a real thing for him, based on his transphobia towards his daughter, who came out as trans. I mean, these are people who have really been radicalized in some very visible ways by right-wing forces, and also by their time spent together on social media, on Twitter and then X.