Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency confirmed to multiple media outlets.
He was appointed just three months ago, after the previous appointee, Colin Burns, resigned less than a week later, The Washington Post reported at the time. Burns previously worked for Anthropic and was “forced out” of his job in April amid the Trump administration’s dispute with the company, sources told the Post.
The reason for Fall’s departure has not been disclosed. Prior to leading CAISI, Mr. Fall served as Director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and Acting Director of the Department of Energy’s Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency during the first Trump administration. Previously, he worked at the Department of Energy’s Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sachs, whose title at the time was White House AI and Cryptocurrency Czar. Sachs resigned in March.
CAISI operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology and is the leading organization that develops technical standards and testing methods for AI models and assesses cybersecurity risks. But that wasn’t the agency at the center of the recent Model Risk scandal.
That happened in June when the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed a vague export control directive, effectively forcing Anthropic to pull its Myth 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 plan.
Earlier this month, the White House also signed an executive order for a new AI safety surveillance program called “Gold Eagle,” creating a clearinghouse to coordinate cybersecurity vulnerabilities. A number of federal agencies were named as part of the program, including the Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. However, as CNBC pointed out, CAISI was not among the federal organizations mentioned.
Meanwhile, after Anthropic’s model was freed from the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for the creation of an independent industry-led standards body to regulate frontier AI, modeled after FINRA. It’s the same kind of mission that CAISI was founded on.
Fall’s resignation also followed a dispute this weekend over Chinese AI research institute Moonshot’s new version of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively compared to its flagship Frontier model. Axios reports that the administration is considering efforts to ban some form of China’s open model. This sparked immediate debate and anger over the weekend, including Sachs, who argued that regulation should not be used as a protectionist strategy against America’s own AI labs.
CAISI has released several reports on the features of the Chinese open weight model Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, but has not said much about the testing process. (Openweight means you can publicly download these models and run them locally, but their training code and datasets are not available.) Since July 9th, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to both the DoC and NIST about how the LLM assessment works, but has not received a response.
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