Trump’s latest AI czar has already resigned
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- Chris Fall resigned as director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) after three months on the job, with the agency confirming his departure but offering no reason.
- Collin Burns, Fall's predecessor, was reportedly pushed out in April after less than a week on the job because he previously worked for Anthropic, which the Trump administration was battling.
- David Sacks, who led CAISI under the title White House AI and crypto czar, stepped down from the role in March.
- CAISI operates under NIST as the primary U.S. organization for developing AI technical standards and assessing cybersecurity risks, but has not disclosed its testing methodology despite TechCrunch inquiries since July 9.
- The White House's "Gold Eagle" AI safety oversight executive order, signed earlier this month, notably excluded CAISI from the list of participating federal organizations.
- After the Commerce Department lifted its export ban on Anthropic's Mythos and Fable models in June, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for an independent, industry-run standards body modeled after FINRA.
Why it matters: Three leaders cycling through CAISI in under a year — with no public explanation for Fall's exit and the agency's quiet exclusion from the White House's own Gold Eagle AI safety order — leaves the U.S. government's primary AI standards body without stable leadership or a seat at the table as Chinese open-weight models like Kimi trigger fresh calls for frontier AI oversight.
