Chris Fall, who led the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has stepped down from his role, the agency confirmed to several media outlets. He had been appointed only three months prior, following the brief tenure of his predecessor, Collin Burns, who left the position in less than a week, as reported by The Washington Post at the time. Sources told the Post that Burns was essentially "pushed out" in April because of his prior work at Anthropic, a company the Trump administration had been clashing with. No explanation was provided for Fall's departure.

Before taking the helm at CAISI, Fall served as the director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and also acted as the director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. Earlier in his career, he worked at the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR). Prior to Burns and Fall, the agency was overseen by venture capitalist David Sacks, who held the title of White House AI and crypto czar at the time. Sacks left his post in March.

CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the primary body responsible for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models, as well as assessing cybersecurity risks. However, it was not the agency at the center of the most recent controversy over model risks. That drama unfolded in June, when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked a little-known 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 after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick expressed satisfaction with Anthropic’s safety plans.

Earlier this month, the White House signed an executive order establishing a new AI safety oversight program called "Gold Eagle," which creates a clearinghouse for coordinating cybersecurity vulnerability responses. A number of federal organizations were named as participants in the program, including the Commerce Department and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet, as CNBC pointed out, CAISI was not among those 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—essentially the same mission CAISI was created to tackle. Fall’s resignation also comes on the heels of recent concerns over Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new version of its open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was reportedly weighing efforts to ban Chinese open models, according to Axios. This sparked immediate debate and outrage over the weekend, including from Sacks, who argued that regulations should not be used as a protectionist strategy for U.S. proprietary AI labs.

While CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models, such as Z. ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it has not shared much detail about its testing processes. (Open weight means these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but their training code and datasets are not available.)