Trump's third CAISI director resigns after three months

Chris Fall has resigned as director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), the federal body that develops technical standards and testing methods for AI models and assesses cybersecurity risks, the agency confirmed to multiple news outlets. No reason was given for his departure. Fall was appointed just three months ago, after the previous director, Collin Burns, left in less than a week — reportedly pushed out in April because he had previously worked for Anthropic, at a time when the Trump administration was battling with the company, sources told The Washington Post. Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title was White House AI and crypto czar; Sacks stepped down in March.

Prior to leading CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, Fall was director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and had served as acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, after earlier working in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research.

CAISI was not the agency at the center of the most recent model-risk episode: in June, the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market, a ban that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick lifted by the end of the month after saying he was satisfied with Anthropic’s safety plans. Earlier this month, the White House signed an executive order for a new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle,” naming the Commerce Department and the Department of Homeland Security among the federal organizations involved — but, as CNBC noted, CAISI was not among them.

The churn comes as scrutiny of AI oversight is building elsewhere. After Anthropic’s models were freed from the ban, Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis called for an independent, industry-run standards body modeled after FINRA — the kind of mission CAISI was created for. Separately, the strong performance of a new version of Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi against flagship frontier models touched off debate this past weekend over whether the administration should move to ban Chinese open models, an idea Axios reported the administration was weighing; Sacks himself argued that such regulation would amount to protectionism for U.S. proprietary AI labs. CAISI has published a few reports on Chinese open-weight models including Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, but has said little about its testing process; TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to the Commerce Department and NIST about its AI evaluations since July 9 without receiving a response.

Why it matters

The fast turnover atop the U.S. government’s lead AI-testing body comes as questions mount elsewhere — from a competitive Chinese model to calls for an outside standards group — about whether the agency can keep pace with its own oversight mandate.