The tiny United States government division charged with checking whether new artificial intelligence systems are safe has no permanent leader, has stopped publishing its research, and its staff have now been asked to report informally to the White House, according to the Associated Press.
Officials at the Centre for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence, known as CAISSI, were recently asked to report to an office of the White House, two former government officials with knowledge of the discussions told the news agency. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid repercussions for current staff.
CAISSI is an independent division of the Commerce Department. It was set up to assess the safety of powerful new AI systems, but it has been in turmoil for months. Its director was hired in April and dismissed within days; his replacement lasted only a few months before resigning. The centre has had no permanent leader since, with the head of its parent institute serving as acting director.
It has also gone quiet. In August, Congress began asking why the centre had suddenly stopped publishing its reports on how safely AI systems were performing. OpenAI had by then also urged policymakers to give the division more money and support. The centre is allocated $10 million a year, about one-eighth of the annual budget of its counterpart in the United Kingdom.
The new reporting arrangement has alarmed critics, who fear the executive branch could politicise decisions that touch on everything from cybersecurity to bioweapons, and that the centre’s findings could be softened or muted in deference to the tech industry, which has largely been left to police itself.
“These are really powerful institutions that can drastically improve our lives, or the alternative. And the hope is that you can put in nonpartisan or bipartisan technocratic experts to enact policy in a way that best serves the American public,” said Caroline Siegel Singh, an AI and emerging technology programme manager for the Federation of American Scientists.
Others argue that bringing the safety officials closer to President Donald Trump, who has taken a largely hands-off approach to AI regulation, could give the division more prominence and perhaps more funding.
The White House did not answer specific questions about CAISSI. In a statement, it said Mr Trump had formally established his new Super Intelligence Force, the president’s preferred term for artificial intelligence, and had commissioned a report on risks from his Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. It said he would ensure “continued US leadership on SI for the benefit of the American people”.
Mr Trump has put National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton in charge of the Super Intelligence Force, alongside the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael. Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the appointments show the administration framing model safety as a national security matter requiring secrecy, overshadowing risks to consumer protection, privacy and civil rights.
The centre’s troubles come as AI capabilities are advancing faster than the government’s ability to check them. Many models are now deployed as agents that work without human prompting and can plan out long chains of steps in the real world. In one recent case, an AI agent sent a false tip to police in Philadelphia about an unsolved homicide. There is still no standard process for testing how safely such agents behave, said Sayash Kapoor, an incoming assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
The centre began life under President Joe Biden as the US AI Safety Institute in November 2023, became the Centre for AI Standards and Innovation in June 2025, and was renamed CAISSI more recently. Under Mr Biden, leading AI companies voluntarily agreed to share details of their models with the division. In September, following alarming reports of AI systems eluding their makers’ control, Mr Trump asked the companies to undertake “tremendous self-policing” under a voluntary safety pact, but his administration has not said how it will monitor whether they follow through.
With the labs encouraged to set up their own internal evaluation systems and hire outside evaluators of their choosing, the role of government testing is now unclear, critics say. “At the end of the day, all of these decisions are of immense public consequence and should be explained and rationalized in the public eye,” Mr Toh said. “And that’s not happening.”
Note: the claim that CAISSI staff have been asked to report to the White House rests on two anonymous former officials speaking to the Associated Press; the White House did not confirm or deny the specific arrangement.
Sources: Associated Press, “Staff at U.S. Center for AI Safety Are Reporting to the White House, Raising Independence Concerns” (8 November 2026), https://broadbandbreakfast.com/staff-at-u-s-center-for-ai-safety-are-reporting-to-the-white-house-raising-independence-concerns/
