Trump’s Newly Appointed AI Czar Resigns Just Days After Taking Office

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

Fall’s tenure lasted just three months, taking over from Collin Burns, who left within a week, as reported by The Washington Post. Sources suggested that Burns was “pushed out” due to his prior ties with Anthropic, amidst ongoing tensions between the Trump administration and the firm.

No reasons have been disclosed for Fall’s departure. Prior to heading CAISI, he directed the Department of Energy’s Office of Science during the first Trump administration and served as the acting head of the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. He also held a position in the DOE’s Office of Naval Research (ONR).

Before Fall and Burns, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, who was the White House AI and crypto czar until he resigned in March.

Operating under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, CAISI is essential in formulating technical standards and testing methods for AI models, as well as assessing cybersecurity threats. Nonetheless, it was not the agency involved in the recent model-risk issue.

That situation emerged in June when the U.S. Commerce Department invoked a rarely used export control directive, forcing Anthropic to pull its Mythos and Fable models off the market. The restriction was lifted later that month after Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick expressed satisfaction with Anthropic’s safety measures.

Earlier this month, the White House also issued an executive order launching a new AI safety oversight program called “Gold Eagle,” aimed at coordinating cybersecurity vulnerabilities. Several federal agencies, including the Commerce Department and the Department of Homeland Security, were part of this initiative; however, CAISI was notably absent from the list.

Following the lifting of the ban, Google DeepMind’s CEO, Demis Hassabis, called for the creation of an independent, industry-led standards organization to oversee frontier AI, similar to FINRA—an objective that CAISI was originally intended to fulfill.

Fall’s resignation comes amid recent discussions about the competitive performance of the updated version of the open model Kimi from the Chinese AI lab Moonshot. The administration was said to be contemplating measures to prohibit Chinese open models, leading to immediate controversy, including from Sacks, who warned against utilizing regulations as a form of protectionism for U.S. proprietary AI labs.

Although CAISI has released a few reports on the capabilities of Chinese open-weight models like Z.ai’s GLM-5.2 and DeepSeek V4 Pro, it has not provided much information about its testing methodologies. (Open weight signifies that these models can be downloaded and executed locally, although their training code and datasets remain inaccessible). Since July 9, TechCrunch has sent multiple inquiries to both the Department of Commerce and NIST regarding its LLM evaluations but has yet to receive a response.