The same CEOs who spent the last decade claiming AI needs regulation are now the ones writing the rules.
The Summary
- Meta's Zuckerberg, Nvidia's Huang, Oracle's Ellison, and Google's Brin join Trump's revived President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, focused on AI policy
- David Sacks (AI and crypto czar) and Michael Kratsios co-chair a panel that could grow from 13 to 24 members
- The foxes are now designing the henhouse
The Signal
This isn't a tech advisory panel. It's the formalization of what's already happening: the people building the infrastructure layer of Web4 are directly shaping the rules that govern it. Zuckerberg runs the platform where billions interact with AI daily. Huang controls the chips that train every meaningful model. Ellison owns the cloud where much of that compute runs. Brin helped create the search monopoly that's now racing to become an answer monopoly.
What's notable is the composition. No OpenAI. No Anthropic. No academic voices who've been sounding alarms about concentration of AI power. Just the incumbent infrastructure players and the crypto-friendly administration official (Sacks) who's been pitching AI and tokenization as twin engines of growth.
The timing matters. We're six months into the agent economy actually working at scale. Companies are deploying AI that makes real decisions, not just drafts emails. Tokenization platforms are moving real assets on-chain. The regulatory gaps are obvious to anyone paying attention. And now the people who profit most from those gaps are the ones advising on how to close them, or more likely, how to keep them open just wide enough for their platforms to dominate.
PCAST has existed before, but never with this particular concentration of commercial interest. Past versions included scientists, educators, ethicists. This version skews heavily toward CEOs of companies that need AI regulation to either not happen or to happen in ways that cement their advantages.
The Implication
Watch what doesn't get regulated. Agent liability frameworks that would slow Meta's deployment. Chip export controls that would hurt Nvidia's growth. Privacy rules that would kneecap Google's data moat. Those are the tells. If this panel recommends light-touch governance and "innovation-friendly" frameworks, you'll know regulatory capture is complete. The other tell: whether any tokenization or digital ownership standards get traction. Sacks chairs this thing. If RWA frameworks suddenly accelerate, that's your signal that Web3 and Web4 are merging at the policy level, not just in practice.
Source: The Verge AI