Who is Sriram Krishnan? Chennai-born AI adviser to Donald Trump set to leave White House

White House AI adviser Sriram Krishnan has announced that he will be stepping down from his position by the end of June. Krishnan made the announcement in a post on X (formerly Twitter), where he called the opportunity to work in the White House a “privilege of a lifetime” and said he plans to take a short break before focusing on ‘helping tackle some of the large challenges facing America on AI’.

Krishnan said that the past 18 months had given him a “front-row seat” to the challenges and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence.

“Whether it is energy, data centres or a clear path for Americans to experience the benefits of AI, there are many tough issues we all need to navigate together,” Krishnan wrote.

He added that he plans to build institutions focused on 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 keep working with Krishnan as an ‘outside adviser’.

Who is Sriram Krishnan?

Born in Chennai, Krishnan completed his graduation from SRM Engineering College before moving to the US in 2005. Krishnan is said to have lived in a ‘typical middle-class family’, with his father working in the insurance sector and his mother as a homemaker.

At the age of 21, he began his career in 2005 with 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 also previously held roles at Facebook and Twitter.

Famously, he played a critical role in Elon Musk’s ‘war room’, helping transition the social media giant from Twitter to X.

During his role as the White House AI adviser, Krishnan helped shape the administration’s AI agenda significantly. According to a report by The Washington Post, he was a key architect of the Trump administration’s AI Action Plan, which was aimed at rolling back regulation of the technology and promoting the expansion of data centres across the US. He was also reportedly involved in the drafting of the administration’s executive order that limited the ability of states to levy regulations on AI while encouraging AI labs to voluntarily submit their models to the federal government for cybersecurity testing.

Reportedly, even Donald Trump has previously acknowledged Krishnan’s contributions. At a White House holiday event, Trump said people often asked him, “who the hell he is,” before adding, “And yet without him things, certainly on AI, would not function well,”

The Washington Post report also noted that Krishnan’s efforts to adopt a light-touch approach to AI often put him and Sacks at odds with Trump’s populist supporters. Krishnan had promoted policies that would accelerate the development of AI, while his political allies are increasingly worried about AI replacing American workers and have pushed for stricter regulation of the technology.

As per 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 so that their capabilities could be assessed to improve security before release to the public.