Sacks tells All-In Huang's exit would leave open-source AI without Nvidia's founder

David Sacks, co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, told All-In co-hosts Chamath Palihapitiya, David Friedberg and Jason Calacanis that Nvidia founder Jensen Huang had been removed. In their account, Huang was the largest corporate backer of open-source AI, and his exit leaves that camp without its principal financier. Sacks said groups he called safetyists, including effective-altruist organizations, are aligned with Anthropic, which he said has funded them for years and is preparing a large initial public offering.

The sharpest lines came after the hosts displayed a post by Will Manidis claiming unnamed chats were celebrating "the killing of the old king." Sacks argued the change concentrates the market and does not improve safety, pointing to what he described as Anthropic's winner-take-all stance. He said the aim is government control of models and chips, including surveillance and back doors. Calacanis, calling his own remarks speculation, tied the timing to critics of chip sales to China who want tracking or remote shutoff. ZeroHedge cited a prior Nvidia security statement that GPUs should not have kill switches or back doors. The recap offers podcast talk and a social post, not a filing or confirmed personnel notice.

The interests on the record are not the same. Sacks and Friedberg describe one path of broad access, which they associate with Huang, and another of control further down the stack, at chips and data centers. Anthropic, as relayed, has said $40 million given to Public First Action — a group pushing safeguards and chip export controls — cannot be used to influence any election. Sacks said Congress is going after other firms, not Anthropic, because Anthropic offers officials power. That is his reading, not a vote tally. A claim that Chinese open-weight models match closed frontiers at a fraction of the cost is the outlet's rough figure, not a cited benchmark.

On the ledger the speakers draw, open-weight advocates lose a patron if Huang's role has in fact ended, while firms and officials favoring export controls and closed models face less industry resistance. The counterparty cost, in Sacks's telling, is centralized authority over compute rather than a safety gain. Anthropic, Congress, and Nvidia are not quoted answering in the source. The episode is a White House-adjacent adviser stating a theory of regulatory capture; it is not, on this record, proof of one.