Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned, the agency confirmed to several media outlets.

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

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

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

CAISI, operating under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is the lead organization for developing technical standards and test methods for AI models, as well as assessing cybersecurity risks. However, it was not the agency at the center of the most recent uproar over model risk.

That happened in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked an obscure export control directive that effectively forced Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable 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 plans.

Earlier this month, the White House also signed an executive order for a new AI security oversight program called “Gold Eagle” that creates a clearinghouse for coordination of cybersecurity vulnerabilities. A number of 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-run standards body to regulate cutting-edge AI modeled after FINRA, the same type of mission for which CAISI was formed.

Fall’s resignation also follows concern this weekend over Chinese AI lab Moonshot’s new version of the Kimi open model, which performed competitively against flagship frontier models. The administration was weighing efforts to somehow ban Chinese open models, Axios reported. This sparked immediate debate and outrage over the weekend, including from Sacks, who argued that the regulations should not be used as a protectionist strategy for proprietary AI labs in the United States.

While CAISI has published some reports on the capabilities of Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro Chinese openweight models, it hasn’t said much about its testing processes. (Open weight means that these models can be downloaded publicly and run locally, but their training code and data sets are not available.) Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple queries to both DoC and NIST about how their LLM assessments work and has not received a response.