White House AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks on Monday, May 25, 2026 invoked the Pope, George Orwell, and a centuries-old Latin maxim to argue that handing governments sweeping authority over artificial intelligence in the name of safety risks creating instruments of censorship, surveillance, and citizen control.

Context

Sacks opened by acknowledging a recent papal warning — that AI must serve human dignity and must not become 'a tool of domination or exclusion' — framing it as a point of agreement before pivoting to a sharper concern. His core argument is that the very governments asked to regulate AI for safety could weaponise that authority against the citizens they are meant to protect.

Quoting the Latin phrase 'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes' — 'Who will guard the guardians?' — and Lord Acton's maxim that 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely,' Sacks cast the AI governance debate as a continuation of the oldest questions in political philosophy. He described this tension as 'the real alignment problem,' a deliberate reframing of a term AI researchers use to describe keeping AI systems aligned with human values.

Policy Backdrop

The post arrives amid active global debate over how AI should be governed. The European Union adopted its landmark AI Act in 2024, establishing a comprehensive risk-based regulatory regime — the most sweeping framework of its kind. In the United States, the Biden administration issued Executive Order 14110 in October 2023, directing federal agencies to set safety and oversight standards for AI development; the Trump administration subsequently moved toward a lighter regulatory touch.

Sacks, appointed by President Donald Trump as the first White House AI and Crypto Czar, has consistently championed private-sector-led innovation over centralised government oversight. His post signals that the administration's resistance to broad AI regulation is rooted not merely in economic competitiveness arguments but in a civil-liberties framework — one that draws a direct line from Orwell's fictional 1984 to contemporary proposals for AI governance.

Stakeholders and Impact

The post positions two camps in direct tension: safety-focused regulators and civil liberties advocates who fear regulatory overreach. AI developers, particularly those in the United States, stand to benefit from a policy environment shaped by Sacks's scepticism of government mandates, while advocates of stronger oversight argue that unchecked AI development carries its own risks to democratic institutions.

For countries like India, which is crafting its own AI governance frameworks, the debate has direct relevance. The question of whether to model AI policy on the EU's prescriptive approach or on a lighter American model is live inside government ministries and technology industry bodies. A senior US official articulating a strong anti-regulatory position adds weight to one side of that domestic conversation.

What's Next

Congressional consideration of AI-related legislation remains active, and any executive action expanding or limiting the regulatory scope of federal agencies over AI will be closely watched. Sacks's public framing of government oversight as a potential vector for authoritarian control is likely to shape the administration's posture in those deliberations and in international forums where AI governance norms are being negotiated.

The oldest questions of political authority, as Sacks argues, do not disappear in the AI age — and how the world's largest democracies answer them in the next legislative cycle may define the architecture of AI governance for a generation.