Chris Fall resigns as director of AI standards center; NIST head named acting director

Chris Fall resigned as director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation three months after the Trump administration selected him for the role. A Commerce Department spokesperson said Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, will serve as acting director of CAISI.

CAISI was established to help the government facilitate testing and collaborative research around commercial artificial intelligence systems.

The agency operates under the Department of Commerce. President Trump signed an executive order on AI during the "Winning the AI Race" Summit in Washington D.C. on July 23, 2025. The order asks AI developers to voluntarily provide models to the government for assessment before full release and directed federal agencies to develop an evaluation framework within 60 days.

CNBC reported that the order followed an earlier June executive order requesting voluntary model evaluations by developers. OpenAI agreed in June to limit the rollout of its GPT-5.6 model series to trusted partners at the request of the U.S. government.

Anthropic disabled access to its Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models to comply with an export control directive issued by the Commerce Department. UPI reported that the Commerce Department placed a temporary export restriction on Anthropic after the company declined to allow unrestricted Pentagon use of its AI system, and that a federal judge later ruled the restriction unlawful.

The Trump administration announced a clearinghouse called "Gold Eagle" in recent weeks to find and fix cyber vulnerabilities in AI systems.

CAISI was not named as an agency involved in the clearinghouse development. Chinese startup Moonshot AI unveiled its Kimi K3 model last week. Moonshot AI stated that its Kimi K3 model closes the gap with leading U.S.

Offerings and surpasses OpenAI and Anthropic on some benchmarks. Venture capitalist David Sacks previously held the position of White House AI and crypto czar before stepping down in March.