Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned from his position, an agency spokesperson confirmed to multiple news outlets.
Fall's tenure at the helm lasted only three months, following a remarkably brief stint by his predecessor. Collin Burns, the prior appointee, departed in less than a week, as reported by The Washington Post at the time. Sources informed the Post that Burns was reportedly "pushed out" in April due to his previous employment with Anthropic, a company that had faced significant challenges from the Trump administration.
No official reason has been provided for Fall's departure. Before his leadership at CAISI, Fall served as the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and held the role of acting director for the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. His career also includes work in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Prior to both Burns and Fall, the agency was overseen by venture capitalist David Sacks, who held the title of White House AI and crypto czar before stepping down in March.
CAISI, operating under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is tasked with the critical mission of developing technical standards and testing methodologies for AI models, alongside assessing their cybersecurity risks. Despite this crucial mandate, the center found itself absent from the most recent high-profile controversy surrounding AI model risks.
This incident unfolded in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an obscure export control directive, compelling Anthropic to withdraw its Mythos and Fable models from the market. The ban was ultimately lifted by the end of the month after Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick expressed satisfaction with Anthropic’s updated safety protocols.
Earlier this month, the White House further underscored its commitment to AI safety by signing an executive order establishing a new oversight program dubbed “Gold Eagle.” This initiative aims to create a central clearinghouse for cybersecurity vulnerability coordination, involving a range of federal organizations including the Commerce Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Notably, as CNBC highlighted, CAISI was conspicuously absent from the list of participating federal entities.
Adding to the landscape of AI governance, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, in the wake of Anthropic's models being unbanned, advocated for the establishment of an independent, industry-run standards body to regulate frontier AI, drawing parallels to FINRA. This proposed body would, in essence, pursue a mission strikingly similar to CAISI’s core objectives.
Fall’s resignation also comes amidst recent intense discussions sparked by the competitive performance of Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new open model, Kimi, against leading frontier models. Axios reported that the administration was contemplating measures to ban Chinese open models, a prospect that ignited immediate debate and outrage over the weekend. Among the critics was David Sacks, who argued against using regulations as a protectionist strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.
While CAISI has published several reports detailing the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models like Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it has remained largely silent on its own testing methodologies. (Open-weight models, in this context, are publicly downloadable and runnable locally, though their training code and datasets are not disclosed). Since July 9, TechCrunch has repeatedly sought information from both the Department of Commerce and NIST regarding their LLM evaluation processes but has yet to receive a response.
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