David Sacks Ends Crypto and AI Czar Role

David Sacks has officially closed out his run as Trump's crypto and AI czar — all 130 days of it — and is now pivoting to a broader advisory role that puts him in a room with some of the most powerful names in global tech. The venture capitalist turned White House insider told Bloomberg on Thursday that US rules capping special government employees at 130 working days in a 12-month period had been exhausted, ending his formal czar duties. But don't read that as an exit. Sacks isn't going anywhere.

The 130-Day Clock Runs Out — What Comes Next?

Sacks will now serve as co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a body more commonly known as PCAST. The transition keeps him embedded in policy circles — he'll just be doing it under a different title, with a wider mandate and a roster of co-members that reads like a who's who of the American tech industry.

A senior adviser to the president told Fox Business that the framing here matters: Sacks isn't being replaced or sidelined. "David will always be his crypto and AI czar, but to the admin more broadly, this new role will allow him to advise on a broader range of critical tech issues," they said. The implication is that the crypto and AI czar label persists — informally if not officially — even as the legal clock ran out on the original appointment.

We've now used up that time.

Who Is On PCAST — and Why Fred Ehrsam Stands Out

PCAST has 13 members covering AI, crypto, healthcare, and quantum computing. The lineup is heavy on enterprise tech titans — people who run companies worth trillions combined. Sacks will be co-chairing alongside names that don't typically share a conference room.

The most interesting pick from a crypto standpoint isn't Sacks himself — it's Fred Ehrsam. Ehrsam co-founded Coinbase with Brian Armstrong back in 2012, then left to co-found Paradigm in 2018, one of the most influential crypto-native venture funds in the space. He's the only member on PCAST who came up through crypto rather than enterprise software or semiconductors. That distinction matters when the council is expected to issue formal recommendations to regulators on digital asset policy.

Sacks described the council's process as collaborative deliberation — members will "study issues together" before producing official guidance. Given the group's reach across sectors, those recommendations could carry significant institutional weight with federal agencies including the SEC, CFTC, and others currently navigating crypto market structure questions. The GENIUS Act — the stablecoin legislation Sacks helped shepherd through — was a preview of what coordinated White House crypto policy can produce.

• Nvidia's Jensen Huang — AI and semiconductor infrastructure
• Meta's Mark Zuckerberg — social media and AI development
• AMD's Lisa Su — chip design and AI hardware
• Oracle's Larry Ellison — cloud infrastructure and enterprise data
• a16z's Marc Andreessen — tech venture capital and crypto policy advocate
• Dell Technologies' Michael Dell — enterprise hardware and computing
• Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam — the sole crypto-native voice on the panel

A 130-Day Tenure That Left Actual Footprints

Say what you want about the speed of Washington — Sacks got things done. During his tenure, the President's Working Group on Digital Asset Markets released a 166-page report laying out a framework for how the crypto industry should be regulated. That's not a press release; that's the kind of document regulators and lawyers will be citing for years.

On March 20, the Trump administration also put out an AI framework — co-developed under Sacks — aimed at accelerating AI innovation and workforce development while building guardrails around children's safety and intellectual property. Crypto and AI policy running on parallel tracks from the same office is something Washington hasn't really seen before.

Beyond frameworks, Sacks has been pushing hard for the CLARITY Act, the crypto market structure bill designed to give the industry the regulatory clarity it has been demanding since at least 2021. That bill hasn't passed yet — and it's now an open question whether Sacks can push it over the line from his new position, without the title that gave him formal standing in those negotiations.

There's a cynical read here: the PCAST role is a soft landing — a way to keep Sacks in the orbit without the legal friction of another formal appointment. But that undersells how much the informal title matters in DC. When a president's inner circle vouches for you as still being "his" czar, that carries real weight in meetings with agency heads.

David will always be his crypto and AI czar, but to the admin more broadly, this new role will allow him to advise on a broader range of critical tech issues.

What Does This Mean for Crypto Policy Going Forward?

The short answer: continuity, not disruption. Sacks built the architecture for the Trump administration's crypto stance — the stablecoin bill, the digital assets working group, the regulatory framework push — and he's not walking away from that work mid-construction. If anything, the PCAST role gives him a more powerful platform, one where recommendations carry institutional heft rather than the individual authority of a single czar.

The bigger question is whether Congress moves faster than Sacks can nudge it. The CLARITY Act is still in progress. Stablecoin legislation, while advanced, still needs implementation. And the AI framework — however well-intentioned — is a policy document, not a law. Sacks has laid the groundwork, but the building isn't finished.

One thing Sacks made explicit to Bloomberg: a central goal for PCAST is aligning federal and state governments on AI strategy. "What the president has called for is one rulebook," he said. That's a massive undertaking — harmonizing 50 different state-level AI approaches with a federal standard is the kind of project that outlasts any single advisory committee.

The crypto market will keep watching. With Ehrsam in the room and Sacks still co-chairing, the industry's voice inside the White House advisory structure isn't gone. It's just wearing a different badge.