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Fall exits CAISI
Chris Fall, director of the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), resigned just three months after being appointed by the Trump administration, leaving the Commerce Department agency under interim leadership.
“The Trump administration is ramping up artificial intelligence regulations, but the leadership vacuum at key organizations overseeing AI policy is shaking the command structure”
Commerce Department spokesperson Kristen Eichamer told CNBC that Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will serve as acting director of CAISI while continuing to oversee NIST.
CNBC said Eichamer did not disclose why Fall, who was tapped to run the organization in April, resigned, and Axios was first to report Fall’s departure.
The leadership churn comes as the Trump administration’s June AI executive order asks AI developers to voluntarily provide models to the government to assess their capabilities ahead of a full release, with federal agencies given 60 days to develop an evaluation framework.
CNBC also reported that the White House clearinghouse “Gold Eagle” has started to “intake and prioritize identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities” and “coordinate scanning verifications,” while CAISI was not named as an agency involved with its development.
Who holds authority
CNBC described the resignation as adding uncertainty about who serves as the Trump administration’s point person for AI policy and research, noting that venture capitalist David Sacks previously held the White House AI and crypto czar role before stepping down in March and not being replaced.
TechCrunch said CAISI was not the agency at the center of the most recent model-risk brouhaha in June, when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market.
TechCrunch reported that the ban was lifted by the end of the month, when Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said he was satisfied with Anthropic’s safety plans.
CNBC reported that OpenAI agreed in June to limit the rollout of its GPT-5.6 model series to a group of “trusted partners” at the request of the U.S. government, while Anthropic had to disable access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with a Commerce Department export control directive.
In the same period, TechCrunch said the White House signed an executive order for “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination, naming a host of federal organizations including the Commerce Department and Department of Homeland Security, but not CAISI.
Policy stakes ahead
The CAISI leadership gap arrives as the Trump administration moves to implement its AI executive order through “Gold Eagle,” which CNBC said aims to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities and puts the White House in charge of greenlighting which companies can access cutting-edge AI models.
“Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned from his post just three months after being appointed by the Trump administration”
CNBC reported that the clearinghouse has already started to “intake and prioritize identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities” and “coordinate scanning verifications,” while CAISI was not named as an agency involved with its development.
TechCrunch said the administration was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, and that the debate and outrage included David Sacks arguing that regulations shouldn’t be used as a protectionism strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.
TechCrunch also reported that 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 to regulate frontier AI modeled after FINRA.
TechCrunch further noted that since July 9 it had sent multiple inquiries to the DOC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work and had not received a response, underscoring how CAISI’s interim status intersects with questions about evaluation processes.
