Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has resigned after just three months in the role, making him the second person to leave the position in quick succession. His predecessor, Collin Burns, lasted less than a week in April before reportedly being pushed out over past ties to Anthropic, and no reason has been given for Fall's own departure. The frequent turnover raises questions about the stability of the US government's approach to AI oversight at a time when regulatory decisions on frontier and Chinese open-weight models are under intense scrutiny.

CAISI, which sits under the National Institute of Standards and Technology, is meant to be the main body developing testing standards and assessing cybersecurity risks for AI models, yet it has been sidelined in several recent episodes. It was absent from the new "Gold Eagle" AI safety oversight programme announced this month, and was not central to June's Commerce Department export-control dispute that briefly forced Anthropic to withdraw its Mythos and Fable models. Fall's exit also follows a weekend row over Chinese lab Moonshot's competitive new Kimi model, amid reported White House consideration of banning Chinese open models, a move former AI czar David Sacks has criticised as protectionist. TechCrunch said it has received no response to repeated enquiries about CAISI's evaluation processes since 9 July.