President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence czar David Sacks spoke out on the new biased, Communist Chinese government-tied AI chatbot DeepSeek.
While Sacks acknowledged China’s innovation on chips and AI during his Fox News appearance on “The Story” Wednesday, he also warned against “woke AI” and allowing China and other international competitors to outpace the United States in such innovations. Sacks went on to encourage U.S. companies to be wary of collaboration with China, urging safeguards against national security risks. “If you download the DeepSeek app on your phone, your data will go back to China,” Sacks stated. This comes as Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) introduces legislation to cut off any AI collaboration between America and China. 
Sacks proposed that America can continue to be a leader in the AI industry if it builds the necessary infrastructure. “I think we need to build out of these big AI data centers, and I think President Trump has expressed support for them, and I think we need to make it easier to build those data centers.” He added that DeepSeek has “shown new ways for AI models to be efficient,” and while U.S. AI companies might “learn and adopt those efficiency techniques as well,” ultimately America needs to focus on learning “to scale compute, and the data centers are essential for that.” Reliable and efficient energy sources are also key, he emphasized.
Related: Glenn Beck Exposes New ‘Extraordinarily Dangerous’ Chinese AI
When asked about whether the U.S. is already behind China when it comes to AI technology Sacks suggested that the U.S. has a three to six-month lead but that China is catching up very quickly. Sacks also explained the likely reason China has been able to catch up.
🚨NEW: David Sacks, AI and Crypto Czar (@DavidSacks) speaks about DeepSeek and the implications for National Security on FOX News pic.twitter.com/AmtsCP8kA2
— Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) January 28, 2025
“There's a technique in AI called distillation …what happens is that the student model asks the parent model a lot of questions, just like a human would learn,” Sacks said. But if an AI asks “millions of questions,” it can “mimic the reasoning process that they learn from the parent model, and they can kind of suck the knowledge out of the parent model. And there's substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of [American company] OpenAI's models.”
Sacks added that he foresees OpenAI and other American companies waking up to this risk and putting in place measures aiming to “prevent distillation by third-party companies that would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.” He agreed with the Fox host that “it’s possible” America needs to restrict tech ties with China.
China, however, is not the only reason that the gap between American and Chinese AI technology has narrowed. Sacks criticized American AI companies for becoming “complacent” and focusing on developing “woke AI,” such as Google Gemini, which infamously generated critical race theory-informed images like a black George Washington.
The Fox News host played a 2023 clip of X owner Elon Musk speculating that there is at least a slight chance that AI “will kill us all.” Sacks replied by noting that AI is a very “powerful technology” that can even have military applications, hence the importance for America to win the AI race with China. “We have to do everything we can to win,” he insisted:
[It] should be unacceptable to any American to live in a world in which China could out -compete us in AI and reap the economic and military benefits of that. So I think we're gonna have to compete very effectively. President Trump, I think, started this in his first week in office. He rescinded the Biden E[xecutive]O[rder], which imposed over 100 pages of burdens and regulations on our AI companies. The Biden EO seems to be crafted in a world without global competition, that seemed to think that we could slow our companies down, and somehow China wouldn't take advantage of that. It's pretty obvious that if we, you know, hamstring our companies, China is going to basically win this race. So we just can't do that.
As noted above, Sacks is by no means the only one in Washington D.C. concerned about this issue. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) is also taking decisive action. Hawley introduced the Decoupling America’s Artificial Intelligence Capabilities from China Act on Wednesday. “Every dollar and gig of data that flows into Chinese AI are dollars and data that will ultimately be used against the United States,” Hawley argued in a press release. “America cannot afford to empower our greatest adversary.”
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