Sriram Krishnan

Sriram Krishnan (born 1984 in Chennai) built product at Microsoft, Facebook, Snap, and Twitter, co-hosted the Aarthi and Sriram Show, and became a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he worked closely with Marc Andreessen and briefly ran Twitter product for Elon Musk in 2022. In December 2024, Donald Trump named him Senior Policy Advisor for Artificial Intelligence at the White House — making an immigrant engineer from Chennai one of the chief authors of America’s AI strategy.

Selling the American stack

Working alongside AI czar David Sacks, Krishnan pushed a distinctly commercial theory of the AI race: the metric that matters is market share — right down to tokens inferenced per month on American models and chips versus Chinese ones. He helped shape the July 2025 AI Action Plan and its export pillar, advocating for the “American AI stack” at summits in France and India and on state visits to the UK and the Middle East. At the India AI Impact Summit in February 2026 he was blunt that the United States wants the world building on American AI infrastructure.

Krishnan drew fire from parts of the MAGA base over H-1B visas in late 2024 and from safety advocates who saw his market-share doctrine as a race to the bottom; he dismissed Washington’s risk-first instincts as “deep state” thinking focused on control. He announced his departure from the White House in June 2026, saying he would keep working on the large challenges facing America in AI.