Trump’s latest AI czar has already resigned

Chris Fall, the director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned from the agency confirmed to multiple news channels.

He was appointed just three months ago after the last appointee, Collin Burns, left in less than a week, The Washington Post reports this at the time. Burns was reportedly “removed” in April because he previously worked for Anthropic and the Trump administration had been feuding with the company, sources told the Post.

No reason was given for Fall’s departure. Before leading CAISI, Fall served as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science and acting director of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy during the first Trump administration. Previously, he worked at the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, whose title at the time was White House AI and crypto czar. Sacks resigned in March.

CAISI, which operates under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the premier organization for developing technical standards and testing methods for AI models and for assessing cybersecurity risks. Yet it wasn’t the agency at the center of the latest model risk brouhaha.

That happened in June, when the U.S. Department of Commerce invoked an obscure export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models from the market. The ban was lifted toward the end of the month, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said he was satisfied with Anthropic’s safety plans.

Earlier this month, the White House did the same signed an executive order for a new AI security surveillance program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for coordinating cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Numerous federal organizations were named as part of the program, including the Department of Commerce and the Department of Homeland Security. But as CNBC noted, CAISI was not among the federal organizations 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-led standards body to regulate cross-border AI, modeled after FINRA — the same kind of mission for which CAISI was created.

Fall’s resignation also follows rows this weekend over the new version of Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s open model Kimi, which performed competitively against flagship models. The government was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, Axios reported. This led to immediate discussions and outrage last weekend. also from Sackswho argued that regulation should not be used as a protectionist strategy for America’s own AI labs.

While CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it hasn’t talked much about the testing processes. (Open weight means these models can be publicly downloaded and run locally, but the training code and datasets are not available). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple questions to both the DoC and NIST about how its LLM evaluations work, but has not received a response.