Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency confirmed to multiple news outlets.
He was appointed three months ago after the last appointee, Collin Burns, left less than a week later, The Washington Post reported at the time. Burns was reportedly “fired” in April because he previously worked for Anthropic and the Trump administration was feuding with the company, sources told the Post.
No reason was given for Fall’s departure. Prior to leading CASI, Fall was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the Trump administration and was acting director of DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He worked at DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR) prior to that.
Before Burns and Fall, the organization was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title at the time was White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks stepped down in March.
CASI, operating under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the primary organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models and cybersecurity risk assessment. But it wasn’t the agency at the center of the recent model-dangerous brouhaha.
That happened in June when the US Department of Commerce implemented a mysterious export control order that forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Myth models from the market. The ban was lifted at the end of the month, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he was satisfied with Anthropic’s security measures.
Earlier this month, the White House also signed an executive order for a new AI security monitoring program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clean environment for coordinating cybersecurity risks. A number of government agencies have been named as part of the plan, including the Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. But, as CNBC pointed out, CISI was not among the federal agencies mentioned.
Meanwhile, after Anthropic models were released from the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis began calling for the creation of an independent, industry-controlled standards body to manage the AI frontier created by FINRA – the same type of work that CASI was created to tackle.
Fall’s resignation also follows this weekend’s hand-wringing over the new version of the Chinese AI lab Moonshot of its open model Kimi, which ran competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration has been weighing efforts to somewhat curb China’s open-air models, Axios reports. This sparked immediate debate and anger over the weekend, including from Sacks, who argued that the regulations should not be used as a protection strategy for US-based AI labs.
Although CASI has released several reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight model Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it has not talked much about its testing procedures. (Open weight means that these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but their training code and datasets are not available). As of July 9th, TechCrunch has sent numerous questions to both DoC and NIST about how its LLM assessment works and has yet to receive a response.
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