Tech

Trump’s latest AI czar has already resigned

Published

5 hours ago

July 20, 2026

Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency confirmed to multiple news outlets.

He was appointed just three months ago after the last appointee, Collin Burns, left in less than a week, The Washington Post reported at the time. Burns was reportedly “pushed out” of the job in April because he previously worked for Anthropic and the Trump administration had been battling with the company, sources told the Post.

No reason was given for Fall’s departure. Prior to leading CAISI, Fall was the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and had been the acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He worked in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) prior to that.

Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title at the time was White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks stepped down in March.

CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the primary organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models as well as assessing cybersecurity risks. Yet it was not the agency at the center of the most recent model-risk brouhaha.

That occurred in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an obscure export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market. 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.

Earlier this month, the White House also signed an executive order for a new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination. A host of federal organizations were named as part of the program, including the Commerce Department and Department of Homeland Security. But, as CNBC pointed out, CAISI was not among the federal organizations mentioned.

Meanwhile, 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 — the same sort of mission that CAISI was formed to tackle.

Fall’s resignation also follows this weekend’s handwringing over Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new version of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, Axios reported. This sparked immediate debate and outrage over the weekend, including from Sacks, who argued that regulations shouldn’t be used as a protectionism strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.

While CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it hasn’t talked much about its processes for testing. (Open weight means these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but its training code and datasets are not available). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to both the DoC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work and has not received a response.

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Tech

Anthropic’s landmark $1.5B copyright settlement is approved

Published

3 hours ago

July 21, 2026

qasimgillani

Anthropic can finally start cutting checks to a group of authors and book publishers that sued the AI lab over copyright infringement. A federal judge gave final approval Monday of Anthropic’s landmark $1.5 billion settlement of a class action copyright lawsuit, Reuters reported.

Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California issued a preliminary approval of the settlement last year, after ruling that Anthropic had illegally downloaded and stored millions of copyrighted books.

Alsup has since retired and Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin signed off on the settlement on Monday.

The payout will deliver $3,000 per work across an estimated 500,000 works, shared among the authors and publishers who hold rights to them. While the settlement is believed to be the largest in the history of U.S. copyright law, many authors and creators still don’t view it as a win.

That’s because of how the legal question was resolved. Alsup sided with Anthropic on the core issue. He ruled that training an AI model on copyrighted text counts as fair use — a decision widely seen as a turning point for the AI industry. But the ruling didn’t excuse how Anthropic obtained the books in the first place. Anthropic had built its training library from two sources: books it purchased and scanned (fine), and books it downloaded from pirate sites like Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. Alsup found the second method illegal on its own terms and said that piracy question could go to trial; Anthropic agreed to a settlement soon after to avoid a trial and whatever damages a jury might have awarded.

While the final approval closes out this case, it doesn’t settle the legal question industry-wide because Alsup’s ruling was a single district court decision, and Anthropic’s decision to settle means the case will never reach an appeals court to become binding precedent.

Other judges are still free to reach their own conclusions on their own facts, which is exactly what’s playing out elsewhere. There is still a string of copyright lawsuits against companies such as Google, Meta, Midjourney, and OpenAI over whether it’s legal to train AI models on copyrighted works. Just last week, a group of publishers and authors, including Hachette, Cengage, Elsevier, author Scott Turow, and S.C.R.I.B.E. filed a class action lawsuit against Google over accusations that the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI platform, Gemini.

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Tech

Colossal Biosciences reportedly in talks to raise new capital at $20B–$30B valuation

Published

4 hours ago

July 20, 2026

qasimgillani

When de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences revealed last year that it was attempting to “resurrect” the dire wolf from genetic material found in fossils, we argued that, despite the controversy surrounding the project, the company was building valuable technologies that justify its $10.2 billion valuation.

Now, roughly 16 months later, the startup is in talks to raise new funding at a $20 billion to $30 billion valuation, Axios reported.

It’s not clear who is leading the new round, or how much capital the five-year-old company is looking to raise. But we do know, according to the report, that Colossal has started generating revenue over the last year.

Colossal co-founder and CEO Ben Lamm told TechCrunch last year that the company sees three revenue streams for the business.

The company has offered its conservation technology to the U.S. government and the UAE, which recently invested $60 million in the company, according to Wired.

Colossal has spun out three startups, including Breaking, a company that helps break down plastics; Form Bio, a computational biology platform that secured $30 million in funding; and Astromech, an AI-driven predictive modeling company focused on biology and life sciences, which was valued at $2 billion in March.

Lamm told TechCrunch last year that the company also plans to spin off its artificial animal womb technology, which could have applications for human fertility treatment. In May, he told Rolling Stone that the technology is expected to be ready next year.

If the company manages to reintroduce extinct animals, including the woolly mammoth and the dodo bird, to their native habitats, it may eventually generate revenue through the sale of biodiversity credits, a market-based mechanism similar to carbon credits, according to Lamm.

The new fundraising effort comes amid a boom in longevity tech, alternative energy, and other deep-tech sectors.

Colossal didn’t respond to our request for comment.