Commerce Department Plans to Shift CAISI AI Testing to Direct White House Oversight

The Commerce Department plans to transfer the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) from the National Institute of Standards and Technology directly under White House oversight, citing persistent operational and resource bottlenecks. The testing body has experienced sustained executive turnover, operating under acting director Arvind Raman after Collin Burns departed in April 2026 and successor Chris Fall resigned in July 2026. Federal officials previously halted public frontier model evaluations following a June 2026 executive order that restricted public outputs and international coordination, shifting the government toward classified benchmarking run by national security agencies amid a broader pivot to AI self-policing. CAISI, originally launched as the US AI Safety Institute before its June 2025 rebranding, relies on voluntary testing partnerships with frontier model developers including OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft.