David Sacks's last-minute call to Trump shelved a White House AI review framework, as Anthropic's $965B valuation raises the stakes of the policy debate.
The executive order was nearly finished. A White House draft circulated last week would have required federal agencies to conduct voluntary artificial intelligence reviews of frontier models before internal deployment. Then David Sacks made a call.
Sacks, a venture capitalist who served as President Trump's AI and crypto adviser before stepping down earlier in 2026, phoned Trump over Memorial Day weekend to urge him not to sign. According to Forbes, Sacks warned the "voluntary" label was misleading: once federal agencies built compliance infrastructure around the process, it would function as a mandatory gate that slowed U.S. AI development. Trump postponed the signing.
In a post on X, Sacks framed the stakes in competitive terms: "Winning the AI race means not only beating China but also clearing bureaucratic hurdles thrown up by state legislatures and woke politicians in DC." Critics say that framing, which equates domestic oversight with geopolitical concession, overstates how directly U.S. review requirements would benefit Beijing.
The stakes of the policy debate
Hours before Sacks went public, Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, pushing it above OpenAI, which was valued at $852 billion in March after closing a $122 billion raise. CNBC reported the new round nearly triples Anthropic's February valuation of $380 billion, with co-leads including Altimeter Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Dragoneer.
Revenue tells the same story. Anthropic's run rate crossed $47 billion this month, up from $30 billion earlier in the year and roughly $10 billion for all of 2025. CFO Krishna Rao attributed the surge to enterprise adoption of Claude and the Claude Code assistant. On the same day, Anthropic launched Claude Opus 4.8, just 41 days after its prior model. According to India Today, fast mode costs three times less than the previous version, a direct response to rising enterprise anxiety over AI infrastructure spending.
That commercial velocity gives Sacks's argument a sharper edge. American AI companies are scaling headcount, burning capital on compute, and competing for enterprise contracts globally. A pre-release review process, even a nominally voluntary one, introduces friction at exactly the moment the industry is accelerating. Sacks's implicit case is that the cost of delay is higher now than at any prior point in the technology's development.
What the order would have done
Its draft text would not have restricted which models could be released publicly. The order targeted federal agency adoption, inserting a review layer before deployment inside government systems. Sacks's objection was structural: voluntary frameworks tend to harden once agencies build procurement rules around them, turning opt-in processes into de facto requirements. In that reading, the artificial intelligence review process was a soft ceiling that would gradually cap what government-adjacent developers could ship.
That concern is not implausible. Regulatory bodies routinely treat voluntary standards as baselines once they appear in contract language. Whether the risk was large enough to block the order entirely, without attempting a narrower fix, is a harder question that Sacks's framing does not address.
Sacks departed his formal White House role earlier in 2026, but the Memorial Day call to Trump illustrates how informal influence can outweigh official titles on complex technical policy questions. Few senior government officials have the domain knowledge to push back on his read of the regulatory landscape. That asymmetry is itself a governance problem worth noting.
Zooming out, the AI industry is growing faster than any oversight structure can track. Crypto Briefing notes Anthropic's latest round included $15 billion in previously committed hyperscaler investment, including $5 billion from Amazon, plus participation from chipmakers Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix. That mix of software platforms, cloud infrastructure, and semiconductor supply chains folded into a single financing round reflects an industry that has already moved past most traditional regulatory categories.
One question regulators will keep confronting: how do you design oversight for a technology whose deployment cycles outpace any review process by design? Sacks's answer, delivered over the phone on a holiday weekend, was that you don't start with this one.
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FAQ
What was the executive order Trump postponed on artificial intelligence?
The draft would have set up a voluntary framework for federal agencies to review frontier AI models before internal deployment. It imposed no restrictions on commercial releases, though critics of Sacks's position say that distinction may be moot in practice.
Why did David Sacks oppose the AI oversight framework?
He argued that voluntary review processes inevitably become mandatory once agencies build compliance infrastructure around them, which would slow U.S. AI development and hand an advantage to China in the global race to deploy advanced AI systems.
How does Anthropic's valuation compare to OpenAI's?
Anthropics $65 billion Series H values the company at $965 billion, above OpenAI's $852 billion valuation from March 2026. Both remain private, though leading AI model makers are reportedly preparing for public offerings.
What is Claude Opus 4.8?
Anthropics latest flagship model, released May 29, 2026, 41 days after its predecessor. Anthropic says it reduces unsupported claims, improves performance on agentic tasks, and ships a fast mode that costs three times less than the prior version.