Former White House Advisor David Sacks: This New Industrial Revolution Has Created Millions of New Jobs, Infrastructure Exceeds the Sum of Railroads, Canals, and Power Grids
Former White House AI advisor David Sacks stated that only the president can convene heads of chip, data center, and cutting-edge model companies at the White House, and claimed that this new industrial revolution has created millions of new jobs, with infrastructure exceeding the sum of railroads, canals, and power grids.
He mentioned witnessing cutting-edge labs signing the "White House Superintelligence Agreement," where companies accept product safety responsibilities and implement internal controls and external audits. He believes this is more effective than waiting for years for potentially unachievable international agreements, summarizing the approach as maintaining U.S. technological leadership while prioritizing Americans.
On the same day, the president signed this voluntary document with Elon Musk, Jensen Huang, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai, Satya Nadella, Jeff Bezos, Dario Amodei from Anthropic, and Greg Brockman from OpenAI, describing it as "morally binding." Zuckerberg explained that the audit layer includes internal risk reviews, external assessments, and independent board reviews. The complete text had not yet been officially released by the White House at that time.
Sacks has previously advocated for industry leadership and opposed a national regulatory queue similar to FINRA. A June executive order had already compressed the voluntary pre-review window for cutting-edge models to about 30 days. Today's statement packages voluntary audits as immediately executable governance, serving as a substitute for legislation and international treaties. The government simultaneously changed the official terminology to superintelligence.
In market mechanisms, this is an intervention of policy narrative on regulatory premiums. Buyers are U.S. labs and computing chains hoping to avoid statutory licenses, while the seller is the White House exchanging ceremony for self-regulation. Funds continue to flow into chips, power, and training clusters, benefiting NVIDIA and cloud vendors; those advocating for mandatory slowdowns and international ceasefire agreements are under pressure. The event-driven nature is strong, and the binding force depends on whether the audits are verifiable, rather than the signatures themselves.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Sacks has long stood on the side of "don't slow the race with regulation" within the Trump team, having publicly mocked the idea of sending models into approval queues. He framed the White House lunch as an industrial revolution-level mobilization, politicizing capital expenditure: data centers, power grids, and chips are described as national projects following railroads and canals, with job numbers used to counter local anti-data center sentiments. The signatory list covers the full stack of designing chips, selling computing power, and writing models, effectively allowing interest allies to jointly commit to self-management in exchange for the federal government not legislating immediately.
The capital pathway is a political endorsement covering the rhythm of hundreds of billions in investments. The agreement does not change training timelines but adds internal controls, external audits, and board procedures; these costs can be accounted for as governance expenses without locking in publication dates. He dismissed international agreements because multilateral texts usually adhere to the slowest party, which would sacrifice the speed advantage of U.S. labs. The Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are placed on emergency standby by the president, while Sacks emphasizes that the domestic voluntary mechanism is sufficient, together forming a division of "pre-management and post-enforcement."
In contrast to the national mobilization of the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, industry self-regulation in internet governance in the 1990s, and the EU AI Act's pre-compliance, the U.S. is currently choosing a third variant: replacing Brussels-style texts with White House ceremonies, with the industry's position being an experiment in self-legislation during an expansion period.
Structurally, this belongs to regulatory change. The mechanism shifts safety responsibilities from legislative bodies to company boards and audit firms that can attend the signing table. Those who can sign participate in defining safety; those outside the table can only accept the narrative of being led. Governance products replace international treaties, essentially buying time to continue competing through demonstrable audit processes.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Signing exchanges time, audits exchange licenses
Mobilization narratives can insure capital expenditures
International agreements are slow, competition agreements are fast