Who is Sriram Krishnan? Donald Trump’s Chennai-born AI adviser is set to leave the White House | Today’s news
White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan has announced that he will step down from his post by the end of June. Krishnan made the announcement in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he called the opportunity to work at the White House “a privilege of a lifetime” and said he plans to take a short hiatus before focusing on “helping solve some of the grand challenges America faces in AI.”
Krishnan said the past 18 months have given him a “front row seat” to the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence.
“Whether it’s energy, data centers, or a clear path for Americans to experience the benefits of AI, there are many difficult issues that we must all navigate together,” Krishnan wrote.
He added that he plans to build institutions aimed at addressing some of these challenges for the United States and its allies.
Meanwhile, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks said in a post on X that the administration will continue to work with Krishnan as an “external advisor.”
Who is Sriram Krishnan?
Born in Chennai, Krishnan completed his studies at SRM Engineering College before moving to the US in 2005. Krishnan is said to have lived in a “typical middle-class family”, where his father worked in the insurance industry and his mother was a housewife.
At the age of 21, he started his career in 2005 at Microsoft, where he worked as a founding manager for Windows Azure.
Before joining the Trump administration, Krishnan was a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and previously held roles at Facebook and Twitter.
He famously played a key role in Elon Musk’s “war room” and helped transition the social media giant from Twitter to X.
During his role as White House adviser on artificial intelligence, Krishnan significantly helped shape the administration’s AI agenda. According to a report by The Washington Post, he was a key architect of the Trump administration’s artificial intelligence action plan, which aimed to avert regulation of the technology and encourage the expansion of data centers across the US. He was also reportedly involved in drafting the administration’s executive order that limited states’ ability to impose regulations on AI while encouraging AI labs to voluntarily submit their models to the federal government for cybersecurity testing.
Krishnan’s contributions are said to have been acknowledged by Donald Trump earlier. At a White House holiday event, Trump said people often asked him, “Who the hell is that,” adding, “And yet, without him, things, certainly on AI, wouldn’t work well.”
The Washington Post report also noted that Krishnan’s push for a light-hearted approach to AI often puts him and Sacks at odds with Trump’s populist supporters. Krishnan has pushed for policies that would accelerate the development of AI, while his political allies are increasingly concerned that AI will replace American workers and have pushed for tighter regulation of the technology.
According to a Bloomberg report, Krishnan was also part of a team in May that helped convince Google, Microsoft and xAI to give the US government early access to their AI models to assess their capabilities to improve security before release.
