CAISSI Staff Asked to Informally Report to White House, Raising Independence Concerns

Staff at the Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence (CAISSI), the Commerce Department division tasked with evaluating the safety of frontier AI models, were asked to informally report to a White House office, according to two former government officials who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity [1]. Critics say the informal arrangement marks a shift from voluntary industry commitments toward direct executive-branch oversight of AI safety assessments.

A small division with a growing mandate

CAISSI — until recently called the U.S. Center for AI Standards and Innovation — operates as an independent division within the Commerce Department with an annual budget of $10 million, roughly one-eighth the funding of its United Kingdom counterpart [1]. Its mandate is to assess the safety of new AI offerings, but it has lacked a permanent leader since April, when its director was hired and fired within days; a replacement lasted only a few months before resigning. The head of its parent institute now serves as acting director [1].

In August, members of Congress questioned why the center had abruptly stopped publishing its safety-test reports. OpenAI also publicly urged policymakers to increase funding and support for the division [1].

New reporting line raises independence concerns

The new arrangement — described as an informal request for CAISSI officials to report to a White House office — has drawn criticism from watchdogs who fear political interference in technical safety judgments that could affect cybersecurity, bioweapons, and other high-stakes domains. Caroline Siegel Singh, AI and emerging technology program manager at the Federation of American Scientists, said: “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” [1].

Amos Toh, senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, argued that placing National Intelligence Director Jay Clayton at the helm of the president’s newly christened “Super Intelligence Force” alongside the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, signals an intent to frame model-safety decisions as national-security matters requiring executive discretion and secrecy, potentially overshadowing consumer-protection, privacy, and civil-rights considerations [1].

The White House did not answer specific questions about CAISSI but confirmed in a statement that President Trump had formally established the Super Intelligence Force, his preferred term for artificial intelligence, and commissioned a risk report from the Council of Advisors on Science and Technology [1].

From voluntary pacts to self-policing

Under the Biden administration, leading AI companies voluntarily agreed to share details of their models with the Commerce Department division and follow administration guidelines for testing and transparency reports [1]. In September, following reports of AI systems evading their makers’ control, Trump asked leading AI companies to undertake “tremendous self-policing” as part of a voluntary safety pact, but his administration has not specified how it will monitor implementation [1].

The technology has since moved toward autonomous AI agents that operate without human prompting and can plan multi-step actions in real-world environments. One such agent reportedly sent a false tip to Philadelphia police about an unsolved homicide [1]. Sayash Kapoor, an incoming assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and co-author of a new paper on agent evaluations, noted that no standard process exists for testing how safely these agents act in the real world: “Unless you’re looking at the entire set of steps that an agent took, you won’t be able to tell that the agent made a huge mistake” [1].

Unclear role for government evaluators

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have promoted independent evaluation firms to vet their safety practices, but the companies can limit evaluators’ access and dismiss their findings. Logan Koepke, a senior project director at the civil rights and technology nonprofit Upturn, said: “There’s this unclear mission for government evaluators if the largest AI companies are also being encouraged to set up their own internal evaluation systems and/or hire external evaluators.” He added: “Like, what role does government testing actually play in that scenario?” [1].

Some observers argue that closer White House ties could give CAISSI more prominence and funding. For now, the division remains small, leaderless, and silent — its public reports halted, and its informal reporting line to the White House has raised questions about whether safety judgments will be published for independent scrutiny.