Indian-origin Arvind Raman takes interim charge after AI security chief Chris Fall quits

Chris Fall, director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), has stepped down just three months after taking charge.

No official reason was given for his resignation. However, Commerce Department spokesperson Kristen Eichamer told Axios that Arvind Raman, director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), will serve as acting director of CAISI while continuing to lead NIST.

Axios was the first to report Fall’s departure.


A Commerce official also told Axios that Fall's appointment had always been intended as a temporary one and that Raman has been reviewing candidates for the role over the past several weeks.

Fall was appointed in April, shortly after Collin Burns left the post after just four days on the job. According to The Washington Post, Burns was "pushed out" because he had previously worked at Anthropic, at a time when the Trump administration was locked in disputes with the AI company.

Before Burns and Fall, the agency was led by venture capitalist David Sacks, who served as the White House's AI and crypto czar. He stepped down in March, joining Trump’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a federal advisory committee composed of industry and academic experts.

Before joining CAISI, Fall led the Department of Energy's Office of Science during the first Trump administration. He had also served as acting director of the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy and earlier worked at the Office of Naval Research (ONR).

CAISI operates under NIST and is responsible for developing technical standards and testing methods for artificial intelligence (AI) models, while also assessing cybersecurity risks.

Fall's departure comes at a time of growing uncertainty over who will lead AI policy and research efforts in the Trump administration, as competition from Chinese open-source models intensifies.

Last week, Chinese startup Moonshot AI launched Kimi K3, claiming it narrows the gap with leading US models and outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic's most advanced systems on some benchmarks.

Also Read: ETtech Explainer: Why Moonshot AI paused Kimi K3 subscriptions within days of launch

Fall’s departure follows a month after Trump signed an executive order requiring companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google to voluntarily provide AI models to the government for capability assessment before their full public release. The order gave federal agencies 60 days to develop an evaluation framework.