Director of Commerce AI standards office out after three months

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation has quietly become a key hub for the federal government to assess potential threats and harms that AI systems pose.

The head of a key federal government AI testing lab is leaving his post just months after taking over.

A Department of Commerce spokesperson confirmed to CyberScoop that Chris Fall is stepping down as director of the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, and his position is being backfilled.

“Following Chris’s departure, NIST Director Dr. Arvind Raman will continue to oversee CAISI and will serve as Acting CAISI Director,” the spokesperson said in a statement to CyberScoop.

Further details about the circumstances behind Fall’s departure were not provided. Axios, which first reported the departure, cited sources saying that Fall resigned.

The Center for AI Standards and Innovation has quietly become a key hub for the federal government to assess potential threats and harms that AI systems can pose to cybersecurity and national security. 

Early in the Trump administration, the center began informally working with frontier AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to test their models for threats, like their offensive hacking skills, assistance with building biological or nuclear weapons and other dangerous capabilities.

Fall was tapped to lead the center in April, and his departure just three months later comes as the White House has elevated the work of the center as one of the key means for determining which frontier AI models do — and do not — represent a step change in cyber or other capabilities compared to what’s available today.

Fall previously held other government posts, including as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, assistant director for defense programs at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and acting chief scientist at the Office of Naval Research.

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Technology

• European parliament members call for slowdown of Serbia’s EU entry over spyware use

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• Wyden seeks upgraded NSA security guidance on commercial VPN use

• The Collective Cyber Defense letter wrote your next vendor questionnaire

Threats

• Chinese espionage groups swarm to exploit triple-link chain of zero-days

• Microsoft discloses two actively exploited zero-days among 974 vulnerabilities

• Russian national extradited to US for alleged involvement in bank-account takeover scheme

• Attackers exploit zero-days in consistently besieged SonicWall product

Policy

• Whistleblower says USPS deploying new, ‘untested’ IT systems governing mail-in ballots

• ‘Watershed 250’ test program in Texas looks to private sector for water cybersecurity help

• Former sexual abuse victims say Grok used their images, videos to train deepfake capabilities

• Cyber threats nudge Trump to sign executive order on foreign equipment in U.S. energy infrastructure