Fall resigned from CAISI three months in without a disclosed reason. The White House now has no single pointperson for AI policy, with the former AI czar's seat also vacant since March.
Chris Fall resigned as head of the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) three months after taking the job, CNBC reported Monday. A Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed the departure but gave no reason for it.
Fall's exit leaves a vacuum in the administration's AI safety apparatus. The White House has not replaced former AI and crypto czar David Sacks, who stepped down in March, according to the report. That means no single official is currently responsible for coordinating federal AI policy across agencies.
Arvind Raman, the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will serve as acting CAISI director while continuing to run NIST, the spokesperson said.
CAISI's job is to work with leading AI labs – Anthropic, Google DeepMind, OpenAI – testing their unreleased models for vulnerabilities and calculating the risks those systems pose, Reuters reported. The agency also tries to limit the ability of U.S. adversaries to use the technology.
Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI signed agreements with CAISI in May to share their frontier models for national security testing before public release. They joined Anthropic and OpenAI, which had signed similar agreements with CAISI's predecessor in August 2024 and renegotiated them to match the new agency's rules.
The Hill reported that Fall's predecessor, Collin Burns, was pushed out by the White House four days after he started because of his ties to Anthropic, which had clashed with the administration. The report said Fall's position was always intended to be temporary.
In June, Trump signed an executive order requiring companies to give the White House access to new AI models before release, take part in benchmarking to examine each model's capabilities, and let government-approved partners access models to strengthen critical infrastructure cybersecurity.
CAISI was not named in the White House's announcement of Gold Eagle, a new clearinghouse focused on finding and fixing cyber vulnerabilities, the report said.
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