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 lower than every week, The Washington Post reported on 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 corporate, 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 in the course of the first Trump administration and had been the acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He worked within the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) prior to that.
Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by enterprise capitalist David Sacks, whose title on 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 first organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models in addition to assessing cybersecurity risks. Yet it was not the agency at the middle of essentially 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 tug its Mythos and Fable models from the market. The ban was lifted by the tip 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 brand new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination. A number of federal organizations were named as a part of this system, including the Commerce Department and Department of Homeland Security. But, as CNBC identified, CAISI was not among the many federal organizations mentioned.
Meanwhile, after Anthropic’s models were free of the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for the creation of an independent, industry-run standards body to control frontier AI modeled after FINRA — the identical form of mission that CAISI was formed to tackle.
Fall’s resignation also follows this weekend’s handwringing over Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new edition of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was weighing efforts to by some means 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 couple of 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 might be publicly downloaded and run locally, but its training code and datasets aren’t available). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to each the DoC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work and has not received a response.
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