David Sacks and Marc Benioff come together at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 for a moderated conversation exploring current business challenges, technology developments, and their broader implications for the global economy.
In a Davos conversation, White House “A.I. and Crypto Czar” David Sacks framed his role as a “bridge” between Silicon Valley’s open, ecosystem-driven “culture of disruption” and Washington’s “command and control” instincts. He credited President Trump’s “tremendous bias for action” for rapid policy momentum, citing strong headline economic indicators and a problem-solving style that pushes decisions in real time: “Get so-and-so on the phone… Let’s work this out right now.”
Sacks argued the biggest near-term threat to U.S. AI innovation is fragmented state-level regulation: “We have 1200 bills… You’re going to create a patchwork.” He advocated a single federal framework that preserves a seamless national market, warning that heavy-handed approaches can deter startups even if large firms can comply. Contrasting with Europe, he criticized regulating ahead of evidence, noting the EU AI Act “was… passed before the launch of ChatGPT,” and rejected the idea that “leadership” is primarily about setting rules rather than enabling private-sector breakthroughs.
On harms, he acknowledged child-safety risks and high-profile “fantasy chatbot” cases, but cautioned against treating AI like addictive social media: “AI less addictive, more a utility.” He defended Section 230’s logic for user-generated content, while suggesting AI liability may differ because firms “are creating content.” On China, he called it “very formidable,” warning the U.S. could lose through “self-inflicted injury” driven by AI pessimism.
All right. Well, congratulations, David, on the incredible speech that the president has given. And we're so grateful that the US administration has come to Davos. And, and with such a large presence and so grateful to you for being part of that. And this is your first World Economic Forum, is that right?
It is. Yes.
Yeah.
It's an honor to be here. And thank you for. Fantastic. The US delegation for including me. But thank you for being such a great host.
Well, we're thrilled to have you. And, you know, I think that one of the reasons we wanted to have this session was, first of all, a lot of folks haven't met you. They they maybe they saw you on the All In podcast, or maybe they've seen you in one of the speeches from the white House on AI or on cryptocurrencies, but I think they'd like to hear directly from you. You know, maybe you can kind of give us your vision of what the role is. You're the AI and crypto czar, but you also are the chairman of Pcast, the President's Committee on Science and Technology. But you've really become one of the president's closest confidants in regards to the overall administration and technology policy. So can you just give us your vision of what is the role that you're trying to accomplish and what the first year has been like?
Well, the I'm really a policy advisor for innovation on two key issues, which are AI and crypto. And I have a special status with the government. It's called a special government employee, where I can work half the year for the government. And then the other half of the year, I get to kind of keep my my old day job, which is being a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and entrepreneur. And the way I see the role is being a bridge between these two worlds that we have this world in Silicon Valley of, of of innovation. And then we have the world of policy making in Washington. And, I feel like I can make a contribution if I can sort of bring that Silicon Valley perspective to Washington.
Well, you've kind of mentioned before, you kind of see a gap in consciousness sometimes between DC and Silicon Valley, and it's more than just the tyranny of distance between the two coasts, but it's kind of the tyranny of, you know, a total misunderstanding of what's happening in the tech industry. How do you look at it today?
Well, there are two very different cultures. It's probably true that there's a cultural divide just between politics and business generally. But then I think it it's turbocharged when you're talking about Silicon Valley, which is a culture of disruption. It's a, it's a culture of, of moving fast, innovating. It, it likes to find new disruptive things. And it has, it has a very open sort of mentality. It has a partnership mentality. People want to build new platforms and invite people onto those platforms. Sort of a critical ingredient of of any big tech tech company that becomes successful. They always want to have as many. They want to build an ecosystem around themselves. They want to have lots of participants. So, you know, they want to have the most apps in their app store. They want to have the most developers working on top of their API. So it's a very open and sort of inclusive mindset. Now you get to Washington and it's it's and I think this isn't specific to Washington. It's more of a of a policy making or more of a bureaucratic mindset where it's more about it's just a more naturally command and control. It's about a little bit more about process. It's more rigid and established. And so these two two worlds can sort of collide. But I would say that the greatest, asset and advocate that innovators have in Washington is President Trump, because he really wants the United States to win. He wants it to be innovative and economically great. And he understands the importance of entrepreneurs and innovators. And so he's really been, I think, the greatest supporter of, of the technology industry in Washington. And it's not just, you know, the tech companies already exist. It's the it's the founders who just have an idea and are starting off in building something, making sure that we create the space for that innovation and experimentation is very, very important.
Well, you are working in a technology industry that is growing incredibly fast, especially in AI and cryptocurrencies, but everything the Committee on Science and Technology is looking at is immense. But you've been able to go remarkably fast. So what's been your secret? How is it that you've been able to go so fast in the first year?
I mean, honestly, it's President Trump. He has a tremendous bias for action. I mean, I think he saw it during his speech.
This is a tremendously consequential American president. He has a tremendous sense of agency. He wants to get things done. And, you know, I've been in meetings in the Oval Office where you'll describe a problem to him. His first instinct is to pick up the phone. It's like, get so-and-so on the phone. And that could be a senator, or it could be a business leader, or, you know, it could be anybody. And his first instinct is, just get him on the phone. Let's work this out right now. You know, any other president would not be like that. You know that. You know, you might get a favorable audience. And then the president would say, well, go see this staff person. And then basically nothing would happen. This president wants to get things done as quickly as possible in that meeting, even if he can't. And he works incredibly hard. I mean, just constantly working. And so when you compound that effect of just meeting after meeting day after day of that problem solving mindset and wanting to get things done, it really adds up. And I think you can now see the results one year later. You see the results in the American economy. It's really pretty incredible. If anyone had said that these would be our numbers after one year, I'm not sure anyone would have believed it. But, you know, in Q4, GDP growth rate, 5.4%, despite a government shutdown that just, you know, that number just kind of blew everyone away. 2.6% core inflation, again, much lower than anybody thought. I think that beat the expectations by 40 basis points. Productivity gains were the highest in years. And then, you know, there's gas prices coming down, unemployment at historic lows. So the numbers have just been phenomenal. And, the administration, the president's been able to do this, I think, in a remarkably short amount of time. And I think things are only going to get better this year. As his full economic program goes into effect.
Can you take us into one of those meetings, something that was you're especially grateful for getting done and completed and and how it got done?
Well, I mean, one issue that I think is very important on AI is and I think one of the great threats to innovation in the United States right now is that we have 50 different states running in 50 different directions, wanting to regulate AI themselves. We have 1200 bills going through state legislatures right now. It's a little bit of a knee jerk reaction, I would say. Some of those regulations may be warranted, but it's entirely too many. And the the fact that you've got 50 different states means that you're going to create a patchwork of regulations. The big tech companies are going to figure out how to comply with that. But it's a tremendous burden for small tech, for startups, for entrepreneurs. One of the great advantages that the United States has had is this huge, seamless national market. Historically, you've only really had to in most industries. Certainly in the internet business, you only have to worry about complying with the single rulebook. Now we're in danger of having 50. And I think the president has been very clear that he would like to see us have a single federal framework for AI regulation. And, and he he's really pushed for this. He spoke to it in his speech on on AI in July of last year. And, you know, in my last few meetings with him, he's really made this an issue. And some of those meetings are ones where he'll say, get, you know, so-and-so, senator, on the phone. And, you know, we'll work out their issues right then and there. And, so, you know, just that's just one example. But he really is the difference maker there.
When you think about regulation, you're here, you're in Europe right now, we're in Switzerland. We've seen a lot of tech regulation in Europe. Some of it has been good. Some of it hasn't been not so good. But we haven't seen really this kind of acceleration of a tech economy in Europe. Do you think it's because of the regulatory environment?
I think that's a big part of it. I mean, the US has other advantages as well. We have this history, I think culturally of accepting failure and risk taking. And it's, you know, if someone fails, it's okay. You just dust yourself off. And then in fact, investors will back you again. There's this tremendous culture of risk taking, and there's a huge venture capital ecosystem to support that. So I think that's very important. But in addition to that, I do think the regulatory environment makes a big difference. And, you know, you look at something like like AI, we're just starting to regulate this now. As I understand it, the European AI act was actually passed before the launch of ChatGPT. So that was in anticipation of something that hadn't happened yet. Well, if the thing hasn't happened yet, you're really regulating based on hypotheticals and fears. And I think a better approach would be to study the issue, see how it's actually being used, see what risks or dangers actually materialize, and then respond to those things. So I you know, I do think that our lighter touch is important. And I think the way and I think there's a difference a little bit in mentality, I don't want to be too much up on our European hosts because I am very grateful to be here. But, but, you know, in his, in his AI policy speech last July, the president said that, you know, we had to win the AI race, that we were in a race. It's a globally competitive race. The U.S. has to win it, just like we declared that just like John F Kennedy declared that we were in a space race and we had to win that, President Trump declared we had to win the AI race. And he then defined several pillars of our strategy. The first one was being pro-innovation. And what he said, though, is that it's not up to the government to do the innovation. It's up to great entrepreneurs. It's our innovators, companies. And you're one of our great entrepreneurs, Mark. Thank you. And, but as people like you who push the ball forward and we have to be in a support role in the government and create the ideal conditions for people like you to do that. Now, look, there's got to be some guardrails and some rules of the road. But fundamentally, we understand that innovation comes from the private sector. Now, when I hear European regulators talk about, AI, there's a little bit of a of a main character syndrome where when I've heard some European leaders talk about AI leadership, they're talking about setting the AI regulations, and somehow the rest of the world's going to copy that. And, that's not the way that we think of leadership, right? We think of leadership as being first and foremost driven by the private sector. So it is a little bit of a difference in mindset there. I hope I'm not over, over stereotyping anyone, but but that's just my general perception.
One of the areas where we kind of partnered, competed, had fun, was in the area of social media, but we did enterprise social media, right. You had an incredible company, Yammer, which you sold to Microsoft, but you really became an expert in social media. And I think when both of us were in social media and we had chatter at Salesforce, you know, we had a lot of conversations about social media. But on the consumer side, it was kind of a very unregulated environment. And we saw a lot of, you know, I would say sometimes bad behavior. But there was kind of some unfortunate things that happened in social media over the last call it 15 years. You know, we've we've gone through it in detail, you know, do you, do you think that we learn some things about that over the last 15 years, from the social media side that we'll be applying to AI?
Well, I think there's definitely some concerns that people have about the influence of social media on children, that sort of thing. We've heard that concern about AI. I'd say it's very salient. People are worried about what impact will this have? And that's something we're definitely looking at. And I think, child safety has to be part of a larger regulatory framework at the same time. And there's been a number of horror stories there about, about examples of self-harm that AI might have contributed to. I would say that at the same time that we recognize that's an issue, we do also have to consider that a billion people are successfully using AI every day, including, you know, lots of high schoolers doing their homework and that sort of thing without a without a problem. I know that in China, they're incorporating AI into K through 12 education, because this is going to be key to upskilling the whole next generation, having the skills to use AI to know how to prompt these AI engines, how to create agents. This is going to be a fundamental skill in the economy. So I think we have to be a little bit careful when we talk about protecting kids that yes, I think we have to be aware of some of those downsides, but we can't act like it would be a good thing for kids not to ever use AI. And I think if all you do is listen to the media, you might get that impression. I think that would be a big mistake. And I talked to my kids about this. I say to them, I asked them, do you feel like AI is addictive? And, and they'll admit that, like, TikTok is addictive and, YouTube and snap, those things are far more engaging to them because they're talking to their friends or they're watching video for for AI. They say, well, it would be hard to live without it because it's so useful, but I don't spend that much time on it. I use it like Google is to look something up. It's to do research. So it's a little different, I think, than social media, where social media really, you could argue it's pretty addicting. I think AI less addictive, more a utility. And but I do think that in the public's mind, there's been a little bit of a transference of the concerns that people have about social media onto AI, and some of that transference is justified and some of it may not be.
Yeah. I mean, we could talk and maybe we should just go into a really super dark scenario and then try to come back into a light scenario. But if we go into a really dark scenario, we saw AI in several situations. You and I talked about that 60 minutes segment on character AI, where the AI morphed into a suicide coach for these kids, and it was something that you and I had never seen before, and it was shocking and horrible, you know, how do you think about that and what's your reaction?
Well, so so this is a case where it's a sort of a fantasy chatbot. I say it's it's a chatbot that's trying to create characters that would then interact with, with users. Some of those users then were teens, and then some of those teens had pre-existing mental issues. And yeah, I think that we saw that you had adverse consequences. They're obviously going to be a subject of litigation to try and determine how much causation there was. But but yeah, I think it contributed to those issues. I think that when you have a new technology like this, that again, a billion people are using so quickly, there's going to be cases like this that happen. I don't think any of these companies wanted those things to happen. And I think that now that they know that it's a possibility, they can start to program the AI in a way that will try and prevent those scenarios.
When the internet kind of came along and even before the internet, we, had well, there's one regulation that everyone in Silicon Valley really loves, which is section 230, and that basically says, you know, these tech companies will initially the social media companies cannot be held responsible, and perhaps, maybe even the AI companies cannot be held responsible for bad behavior for the AI. When you look at section 230 and kind of accountability, self-regulation, do you think that, you know, do you think the section 230 should be reformed, re reshaped, reconstructed, or do you think it stands as it is kind of kind of preventing, you know, and kind of holding full indemnification for the tech vendor?
Well, I might be the last person on either side of the political aisle who thinks that section 230 was a visionary piece of legislation that helped pave the way for the modern internet. I know there's opposition to it on both sides. The reason I say that is because what 230 did, is it it basically defined who's a publisher and who's a distributor. And under the existing law, publishers are held to to one standard. Distributors are held to another. In other words, if you're, say, a magazine on the distribution stand and you libel someone or an article in your publication libel someone, well, you can be sued and you're on the hook for that and you're going to end up paying damages. Now, the newsstand on which your magazine is sold, that is a distributor and it is not subject to publisher liability. And so what section 230 did is take those sort of real world examples and apply them to online contexts. And specifically what it said is that user generated content is will be treated on these platforms, that the platforms will be distributors, not publishers. Now, look, if those platforms are actually publishing the content themselves. And I think that's probably would apply to AI companies who are creating content, we're going to hold them to publisher liability. But if all they're doing is acting as a distributor, then we're going to impose distributor liability. I think that distinction made a lot of sense. Maybe it's not perfect in some cases, but without that, I don't think you would have had comment boards on the internet. I think, you know, user review sites like Yelp might have been sued out of existence. Think about it every time someone posts a review on Yelp that the store owner says, well, that's defamatory, I'm opposed to that. They can now sue Yelp. I think that these user generated platforms may not have survived. And so I think it was very, very important in terms of allowing user generated content to flourish all over the internet, including then on social media platforms. Ultimately, it's the user that benefits from the ability to express themselves. And I'm just not sure that if all of those UGC platforms were treated like publishers, that we'd be able to express ourselves in the way that we've been able to. And yes, you can point to some downsides of that, but on the whole, I think it's been very positive. And what I worry about is if 230 gets reformed and gets to be more restrictive, it's going to lead to much greater censorship. You know, already corporations have been taking down a lot of content that I mean, I think it's now a much better under President Trump. But under the last administration, you saw an epidemic of shadowbanning banning de-platforming when someone expressed an opinion that went against the, you know, the the sort of conventional wisdom or the powers that be saw a lot of censorship during Covid, things that are now recognized as being true cannot be said without the user. Like Doctor Jay Bhattacharya was kicked off X for the Great Barrington Declaration. So you look back on those things and say, gee, you know, that was a really dangerous period where people were censored too much. We've now moved out of it. But what I worry about is you take away section 230 protection. And now, because of simple corporate risk aversion, these sites are really going to clamp down and people aren't gonna be able to express themselves in the same way.
And how about then making the connection back to what we're talking about with AI or an AI that is behaving badly?
Well, I'm not sure that section 230 does apply to AI companies. Because I mean, look, this is getting into novel areas of law. Who knows how it's going to, you know, be determined. Probably I'd want to consult some lawyers about this, but, if you're getting me to react on the fly to this, you know, 230 is always been applied to user generated content on platforms. In the case of AI, it's the AI company that's publishing the content. So I think the liability might be a little different, but we'll we'll see how it plays out.
When you look at the opportunity now with China and AI, we've seen China really evolve a lot in the last year. We're seeing deep seek for now about to emerge. Exactly like what you said. There is an AI race going on. Where do you see the US and China right now in the AI race? And, the model innovation that we've seen in both countries.
So China is very formidable. They've got a lot of smart people there. They've got a lot of technological prowess. You've got, you know, half a dozen really, impressive frontier models coming out of China with deep was sort of the original one that broke through about a year ago. Actually, it was about this time this year that deep sea launched. And I think a big part of the deep seek moment was the surprise factor that I think people had been complacent about where about the nature of the global competition, and they didn't think you would. People would say that China's years behind then deep sea launched and you realized, wait a second, they're actually closer than that. I still think that the US is in the lead. I think that our models are better, our chips are better. But they do have other advantages. There are, spinning up power generation faster than we are. That's one area. I'd say. Another area that concerns me is AI optimism. So, there was a survey done by Stanford recently, and they surveyed people in lots of different countries, and they asked them, do you believe the benefits of AI will outweigh the harms? And if if the respondents said yes, they'd be an AI optimist, and if they said the harms outweighed the gains, they were an AI pessimists. Well, in China, 83% of the population are AI optimists. In the US, that number is only 39%. And we generally see that in Western countries, the AI optimism is a lot lower and it's a lot higher in Asian countries. And I think it's a really interesting question about why they're more optimistic than we are. And who's right about that. But where I kind of worry is in the AI race that if in a fit of pessimism, we do something like what Bernie Sanders wants, which is he wants to stop building all data centers, or if we have 1200 different AI laws in the states, you know, clamping down on this, clamping down on innovation, I worry that we could lose the race because of a self-inflicted injury. So I hope that people will become a little bit more optimistic of this, about this industry as more and more miraculous products come out.
David, we're unfortunately having to cut it short because the president's speech went a little bit long. So maybe you could address that directly with him. I want to thank you so much for coming to Davos this year, and I hope we'll see you again, because we're so thrilled that you're here.
Well, thank.
You for having me. Appreciate it. Thanks.