The head of Trump’s AI security agency CASI has resigned after months on the job

Chris Fall, head of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, has resigned as director just three months after being appointed to the job by the Trump administration, CNBC confirmed Monday.

CAISI, part of the US Department of Commerce, aims to help the government conduct “joint evaluation and research” on commercial artificial intelligence programs, according to its website.

Commerce Department spokeswoman Kristen Eichamer told CNBC that Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will serve as CASI’s acting director and continue to oversee the agency. Eichamer did not disclose why Fall, who was appointed to lead the organization in April, resigned.

Axios was the first to report Fall’s departure.

His exit adds to growing uncertainty about who serves as the Trump administration’s point person on AI policy and research. Venture capitalist David Sacks previously held the position of White House AI and crypto czar, but he stepped down from that role in March and has not been replaced.

It’s a very critical time for the White House as China’s open source models are gaining ground in the US against large proprietary models from OpenAI and Anthropic. Late last week, Chinese company Moonshot AI unveiled a new model, the Kimi K3, which it says closes the gap with the best US offerings and surpasses the more powerful OpenAI and Anthropic systems in some benchmarks.

The Trump administration has taken a proactive approach to AI regulations since the president signed the AI ​​executive order in June. The order asks AI developers to voluntarily provide models to the government to test their capabilities before full rollout, and gives government agencies 60 days to develop a test framework.

This process has been difficult for companies that have tried to introduce new powerful models in the meantime.

OpenAI said in June that it had agreed to limit the release of its GPT-5.6 model series to a group of “trusted partners” at the request of the US government. Two weeks earlier, Anthropic had to disable access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with an export control order issued by the Department of Commerce. Both companies were later able to release their models more widely.

The Trump administration has taken the first steps to implement the executive order in recent weeks, namely by announcing a refinery called “Gold Eagle.” The clearinghouse aims to detect and fix cyber risks, and puts the White House in charge of green-lighting companies to access advanced AI models, as CNBC previously reported.

The clearinghouse has already begun to “identify and prioritize cybersecurity risks” and “coordinate scan verification,” according to a White House release. CASI was not designated as a stakeholder in its development.

WATCH: Mr. senior WH policy advisor on Trump administration lifting restrictions on Anthropic AI models