US President Donald Trump has an executive order on AI after signing it during the “Winning the AI Race” summit in Washington DC, USA, on July 23, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Reuters
Chris Fall, the head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, resigned from his role as director just three months after being tapped for the job by the Trump administration, CNBC confirmed Monday.
According to its website, CAISI, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, aims to help the government “facilitate testing and collaborative research” around commercial artificial intelligence systems.
Commerce Department spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer told CNBC that Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will serve as acting director of CAISI and continue to oversee the agency. Eichamer did not disclose why Fall, who was hired to lead the organization in April, resigned from his position.
Axios was first to report Fall’s departure.
His departure adds to growing uncertainty over who will serve as the Trump administration’s point man on AI policy and research. Venture capitalist David Sacks previously held the position of White House AI and crypto czar, but resigned from that position in March and has yet to be replaced.
It’s a particularly sensitive moment for the White House as Chinese open source models gain traction in the US over large proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Late last week, Chinese startup Moonshot AI introduced a new model, Kimi K3, that it says closes the gap with leading U.S. offerings and outperforms the best-performing systems from OpenAI and Anthropic in some benchmarks.
The Trump administration has taken a more hands-on approach to AI regulation since the president signed an AI executive order in June. The order required AI developers to voluntarily provide models to the government to evaluate their capabilities before a full release and gave federal agencies 60 days to develop an evaluation framework.
For companies that have tried to bring powerful new models to market in the meantime, the process has been unclear.
OpenAI announced in June that it had agreed to limit the rollout of its GPT 5.6 model suite to a group of “trusted partners” at the request of the U.S. government. Two weeks earlier, Anthropic had to suspend access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with an export control directive issued by the Department of Commerce. Both companies later managed to bring their models onto the market more widely.
The Trump administration has taken steps in recent weeks to begin implementing the executive order, most notably by announcing a clearinghouse called “Gold Eagle.” The clearinghouse’s goal is to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities, and it tasks the White House with greenlighting which companies can access cutting-edge AI models, CNBC previously reported.
According to a statement from the White House, the clearinghouse has already begun “accounting for and prioritizing identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities” and “coordinating scan verifications.” CAISI was not named as an agency involved in the development.
REGARD: Mr. Senior WH policy advisor on the Trump administration’s lifting of restrictions on Anthropic’s AI models
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https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/20/trumps-head-of-ai-safety-agency-caisi-resigns-after-months-on-job.html
