US AI Safety Chief Chris Fall Resigns After 3 Months

The head of the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), Chris Fall, resigned from that role three months after he was selected for it, CNBC reported Monday (July 20).

A Commerce Department spokesperson confirmed Fall’s resignation without disclosing the reason, according to the report. CAISI is part of the Commerce Department.

The director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Arvind Raman, will serve as acting director of CAISI while continuing to oversee NIST, the report said, citing the spokesperson.

The report said that when the White House announced a clearinghouse called Gold Eagle that will focus on finding and fixing cyber vulnerabilities, CAISI was not named as an agency involved with its development.

Fall’s departure leaves the White House without a clear pointperson for AI policy and research. Former White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks stepped down from that role in March and has not been replaced, the report said.

The Hill reported Monday that Fall’s predecessor at CAISI, Collin Burns, was pushed out of that position by the White House four days after he started due to his ties to Anthropic, which clashed with the administration.

The report said Fall’s position was always meant to be temporary.

Reuters reported Monday that CAISI is responsible for working with leading AI labs such as Anthropic, Google DeepMind and OpenAI, testing their unreleased models for vulnerabilities, calculating risks posed by advanced models and limiting the opportunities for U.S. adversaries use AI.

PYMNTS reported in May that Google DeepMind, Microsoft and xAI signed agreements with CAISI to share their frontier AI models with the agency for national security testing before releasing those models to the public. The companies joined Anthropic and OpenAI, which signed agreements with CAISI’s predecessor in August 2024 and later renegotiated these agreements to match CAISI’s directives.

In June, Trump signed an executive order that asks companies to provide the White House with access to new AI models before their release, take part in benchmarking to examine each model’s capabilities, and allow the government’s trusted partners access to models to strengthen the cybersecurity of critical infrastructure.