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Published On: Tue, Nov 4th, 2025

David Sacks: Orwellian AI Is A Massive Threat To Free People

White House AI czar David Sacks joined a16z’s Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg for a discussion on the growing risk of politicizing artificial intelligence. Sacks warned that AI could become an Orwellian tool used to advance the political agenda of those in power.

DAVID SACKS: I almost feel like the term woke AI is insufficient to explain what’s going on, because it somehow trivializes it. I mean, what we’re really talking about is Orwellian AI. You know, we’re talking about AI that lies to you, that distorts an answer, that rewrites history in real time to serve a current political agenda of the people who are in power. I mean, it’s very Orwellian. And we were definitely on that path before President Trump’s election. It was part of the Biden EO. We saw it happen in the release of that first Gemini model. That was not an accident. Those distorted outputs came from somewhere. To me, this is the biggest risk of AI, actually. It was not described by James Cameron. It was described by George Orwell. In my view, it’s not the Terminator. It’s 1984, that as AI eats the internet and becomes the main way that we interact and get our information online, that it’ll be used by the people in power to control the information we receive, that it’ll contain an ideological bias, that essentially it’ll censor us. All that trust and safety apparatus that was created for social media will be ported over to this new world of AI. And then on top of that, you’ve got the surveillance issues where AI is going to know everything about you. It’s going to be your kind of personal assistant. And so it’s kind of the perfect tool for the government to monitor and control you. And to me, that is by far the biggest risk of AI. And that’s the thing we should be working towards preventing. And the problem is a lot of these regulations that are being whipped up by these fear-mongering techniques, they’re actually empowering the government to engage in this type of control that I think we should all be very afraid of, actually.


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