{"slug": "trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned", "title": "Trump’s latest AI czar has already resigned", "summary": "Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned after just three months on the job, the agency confirmed to multiple news outlets. Fall, previously director of the Department of Energy's Office of Science, is the third leader to depart CAISI in recent months, following Collin Burns, who left in less than a week in April, and venture capitalist David Sacks, who stepped down in March. CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is tasked with developing AI technical standards and testing methods but was notably excluded from the White House's new 'Gold Eagle' AI safety oversight program announced earlier this month.", "body_md": "Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency [confirmed](https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/trumps-head-of-ai-safety-agency-caisi-resigns-after-months-on-job.html) to multiple news outlets.\n\nHe was appointed just three months ago after the last appointee, Collin Burns, left in less than a week, The [Washington Post reported](https://archive.ph/FoRO3#selection-433.0-433.60) at the time. Burns was reportedly “pushed out” of the job in April because he previously worked for Anthropic and the Trump administration had been battling with the company, sources told the Post.\n\nNo reason was given for Fall’s departure. Prior to leading CAISI, Fall was the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and had been the acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He worked in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) prior to that.\n\nBefore Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title at the time was White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks stepped down in March.\n\nCAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the primary organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models as well as assessing cybersecurity risks. Yet it was not the agency at the center of the most recent model-risk brouhaha.\n\nThat occurred in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an obscure export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market. The ban was [lifted by the end of the month](https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/30/trump-drops-restrictions-on-anthropics-mythos-and-fable-models/), when Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said he was satisfied with Anthropic’s safety plans.\n\nEarlier this month, the White House also [signed an executive order](https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/07/white-house-launches-gold-eagle-initiative-for-unprecedented-cybersecurity-vulnerability-coordination/) for a new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination. A host of federal organizations were named as part of the program, including the Commerce Department and Department of Homeland Security. But, as CNBC pointed out, CAISI was not among the federal organizations mentioned.\n\nMeanwhile, after Anthropic’s models were freed from the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for the creation of an [independent, industry-run standards body](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/14/deepmind-ceo-calls-for-an-independent-standards-body-to-regulate-frontier-ai/) to regulate frontier AI modeled after FINRA — the same sort of mission that CAISI was formed to tackle.\n\nFall’s resignation also follows this weekend’s handwringing over [Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s](https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/18/kimi-threat-or-menace/) new version of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, [Axios reported](https://www.axios.com/2026/07/20/ai-us-china-open-source-kimi). This sparked immediate debate and outrage over the weekend, [including from Sacks](https://x.com/DavidSacks/status/2078826291638522127), who argued that regulations shouldn’t be used as a protectionism strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.\n\nWhile CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it hasn’t talked much about its processes for testing. (Open weight means these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but its training code and datasets are not available). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to both the DoC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work and has not received a response.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned", "canonical_source": "https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/20/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned/", "published_at": "2026-07-20 22:21:04+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-20 22:23:26.295125+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-policy", "ai-safety", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["Chris Fall", "Center for AI Standards and Innovation", "Collin Burns", "David Sacks", "National Institute of Standards and Technology", "Anthropic", "Google DeepMind", "Moonshot"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/trumps-latest-ai-czar-has-already-resigned.jsonld"}}