AP: CAISSI Staff Informally Report to White House Office

The Commerce Department's Center for Advancing Innovation and Standards for Super Intelligence, known as CAISSI, runs on about $10 million a year, roughly one-eighth of what the United Kingdom spends on its counterpart. Staff there were recently asked to informally report to an office of the White House, according to two former government officials cited by the Associated Press.

The center is formally an independent Commerce Department division. It has no permanent leader. A director was hired in April and fired within days. A replacement resigned a few months later. The head of the parent institute now serves as acting director. In August, Congress asked why CAISSI had stopped publishing its AI safety research.

"At the end of the day, all of these decisions are of immense public consequence and should be explained in the public eye," Amos Toh of the Brennan Center for Justice told the AP. "And that's not happening."

Caroline Siegel Singh of the Federation of American Scientists told the news agency the hope for bodies like CAISSI was that "you can put in nonpartisan or bipartisan technocratic experts." The Trump administration has stood up what the White House calls the Super Intelligence Force.

The AP's account rests on two former officials and does not name the departed directors, the specific White House office receiving the informal reports, or the parent-institute head now acting as director.