The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) is a US federal AI standards body within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), Department of Commerce. It is the successor to the AI Safety Institute (AISI) created under Biden Executive Order 14110; it was renamed and rescoped under the Trump Administration in 2025 to emphasize "standards and innovation" over "safety." CAISI produces guidance, workshops, and publications on AI evaluation, monitoring, and standards, and convenes the NIST AI Consortium with industry and federal-agency stakeholders.
Activities
CAISI's work spans workshops and consortia, technical publications, and standards crosswalks. In 2025 it held three workshops on post-deployment AI system monitoring with external stakeholders, federal agencies, and the larger NIST AI Consortium, which draws subject-matter experts from more than 10 federal agencies and roughly 200 external experts in academia and industry. It produces NIST AI publications on monitoring, evaluation, agent standards, and risk management.
CAISI has published crosswalk documents mapping the NIST AI RMF to ISO/IEC 42001, the OECD AI Principles, and other frameworks. Standards Are the New Legislation (Clearwater, March 2026) describes these crosswalks as a "Rosetta Stone" for global governance interoperability that most observers overlooked.
Publications
- NIST AI Risk Management Framework — predates CAISI but is maintained by NIST.
- NIST AI 600-1 Generative AI Profile.
- NIST AI Agent Standards (2026).
- NIST AI 800-4 Challenges to the Monitoring of Deployed AI Systems (March 2026), described as CAISI's most extensive substantive report on monitoring.
Evaluation work
CAISI has issued four reports finding Chinese models significantly less secure than US counterparts (Source: washingtonpost.com). Its published evaluation of DeepSeek R1-0528 found that the model complied with 94% of jailbreak prompts, against 8% for US reference frontier models. Anthropic cites this benchmark in its "2028: Two Scenarios" policy paper as evidence for tightening export controls and disrupting distillation pathways. The result has been used as an anchor for arguments about a safety gap between US and Chinese frontier models.
AI Agent Standards Initiative
CAISI launched the AI Agent Standards Initiative on February 17, 2026, organized around three pillars: industry-led standards (voluntary guidelines feeding US leadership in international standards bodies); pre-deployment evaluation infrastructure (voluntary benchmarking access ahead of public release); and critical-infrastructure deployment guidance (coordination with CISA on sector-by-sector deployment). See NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative (Feb 2026).
Pre-deployment evaluation and the institutional-home question
On May 5, 2026, CAISI signed pre-deployment evaluation agreements with Microsoft, Google, and xAI, establishing a multi-lab voluntary benchmarking channel for frontier models ahead of release. On May 11, the Commerce Department deleted the May 5 announcement from its website, reportedly at the urging of the White House Office of the National Cyber Director (ONCD). Reporting framed the deletion as a sign that the ONCD prefers a different institutional home for frontier-model pre-release evaluation, with some accounts pointing to an ODNI-led center as the favored alternative and Commerce opposing that arrangement; whether the deletion reflected one-off political housekeeping or a broader withdrawal of CAISI from the pre-deployment-vetting role was not clear from the reporting (Source: reuters.com).
Bipartisan signals on May 12-13, 2026 — a 32-member House letter to NCD Cairncross and an open letter from ICBA, BSA, and TechNet — both rejected mandatory pre-release review and favored ONCD-as-coordinator, positions that align with CAISI's voluntary-track role even as the May 5 announcement was removed.
OpenAI published its frontier safety blueprint on June 2, 2026, and summarized it in a Global Affairs post the following day. The blueprint calls for CAISI to become the federal government's primary frontier-AI safety authority, with permanent authorization and funding, flexible hiring, and classified-compute access. It frames CAISI as an independent evaluator rather than a deployment-approving regulator: it would certify third-party assessors and track progress toward recursive self-improvement, but would not hold a pre-clearance or licensing role. OpenAI's proposal aligns with the voluntary-track posture reinforced by the May 2026 signals and with the "visibility, not approval" architecture of the June 2 executive order, and it endorses CAISI over an ODNI-led alternative as the institutional home for frontier evaluation (Source: openaiglobalaffairs.substack.com). See AI Pre-Release Vetting.
On June 9, 2026, Trump administration officials — including National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross — directed CAISI to halt publication of its model assessments while the June 2 executive order is implemented, a pause reported to reflect a push by Cairncross and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to give national-security considerations a larger role in how AI models are evaluated. The move threw the unit's public-facing future into doubt despite praise for its work from AI developers, and bears on whether independent evaluators publish assessments of newly released frontier models such as Claude Fable 5 (Source: wsj.com).
CAISI researchers tested and endorsed the new safety classifier Anthropic deployed for its July 1, 2026 redeployment of Fable 5 after the export-control lift, an operational evaluation role during a period when the unit's public assessments remained paused (Source: anthropic.com; thehackernews.com).
CAISI's testing was also the stated basis for the Commerce Department's July 7, 2026 clearance of OpenAI's GPT-5.6 for broad public release, ending the staggered rollout imposed in June; OpenAI announced public launch of the Sol, Terra, and Luna tiers for July 9 (Source: axios.com).
OpenAI restated and sharpened its institutional preference on August 3, 2026, saying it had pushed the administration and bipartisan members of Congress for CAISI to hold a central role in determining which frontier systems undergo review, what criteria apply, and how quickly reviews happen — an allocation of the gatekeeping question to CAISI that goes further than the June 2 blueprint's certify-and-track framing, while keeping the evaluate-don't-license boundary (Keeping America out in front on AI (OpenAI Global Affairs, August 2026)).
Leadership
Chris Fall, appointed CAISI director in April 2026, resigned on July 20, 2026, three months into the role; NIST Director Arvind Raman became acting director while Commerce seeks a permanent replacement (Source: axios.com; theinformation.com).
Funding
Axios reported on July 10, 2026 that CAISI operates on a $15 million budget against an estimated $84 million annual need, a gap cited in accounts of the administration's reliance on ad hoc, negotiation-based model vetting rather than standardized severity frameworks (Source: axios.com). See AI Pre-Release Vetting.
Fathom CEO Andrew Freedman argued in a July 1, 2026 Transformer op-ed that the Supreme Court's June 29 Slaughter ruling — which held the president may remove independent-agency heads at will — strengthens the case for accredited independent verification organizations reporting to CAISI rather than a new independent agency, noting Connecticut and Virginia have already passed independent-verification bills (Source: transformernews.ai).
Standards as governance baseline
Per Andrew Clearwater's analysis (Standards Are the New Legislation (Clearwater, March 2026)), NIST's frameworks are increasingly the de facto national governance baseline for US AI. Clearwater identifies several channels: Texas TRAIGA cites NIST frameworks for safe-harbor compliance on an incentive lane; Illinois SB 3312, Utah HB 286, and Washington HB 2157 cite them on a mandate lane; California TFAIA / SB 53 uses them on a transparency lane for required disclosure; and courts use them to define standard-of-care in negligence and strict-liability cases even where no statute mandates it. Clearwater compares the pattern to the trajectory of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and notes bipartisan support for leveraging NIST to develop technical AI standards.
International standard-setting
NIST states that CAISI founded the International Network for Advanced AI Measurement, Evaluation, and Science in November 2024, and that the network, comprising government bodies from ten jurisdictions, published consensus areas and open questions on practices for automated AI evaluations on February 13, 2026, drawing on CAISI's draft best practices for automated benchmark evaluations (Source: nist.gov). See International AI Safety Institute Network (INSAI / AISIN).
OpenAI's September 21, 2026 position paper proposes that the United States lead the development of global technical standards for frontier AI, including for recursive self-improvement, by using the network of AI safety institutes "to facilitate standard setting through the CAISI and national industry bodies," with standards for capability measurement and evaluation, risk assessment and safeguard sufficiency that "would not be licenses, mandatory prerelease review, or approval requirements for AI models" (Building Standards for the Next Phase of AI (OpenAI, September 2026); International AI Standards). The paper dates CAISI's creation of the network to 2024 while linking the February 2026 NIST item.
A House bill announced on September 22, 2026 by Reps. Sam Liccardo and Kevin Kiley would direct CAISI to establish an initiative of AI safety experts from industry, academia and civil society to work with counterparts in other countries, with foreign AI safety institutes and through U.S. participation in bodies "such as the International Organization for Standardization," prioritizing harmonized AI safety testing and evaluation metrics, "means to verify compliance," and the groundwork for a U.S.–China agreement on catastrophic AI risk; it would authorize $100 million "to support the operations of CAISI in this endeavor" (Negotiating AI Safety Globally — Liccardo–Kiley outline of U.S.–China frontier AI safety legislation (September 2026); Liccardo–Kiley U.S.–China frontier AI safety negotiations bill (2026)).
Legislation to codify the Center
The Center operates without a statute of its own. The Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 (S. 3952), introduced February 26, 2026 by Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) with Sens. Maria Cantwell, Marsha Blackburn and John Hickenlooper, would supply one by inserting a new section 22B into the NIST Act, after the section 22A that carries the authorities the Center currently exercises. Within 90 days of enactment the NIST Director would "establish a center on artificial intelligence within the Institute," to be known as the Center for Artificial Intelligence Standards and Innovation, with the mission "to assist the private sector and agencies in developing voluntary best practices for the robust assessment of artificial intelligence systems, which may be contributed to or inform the work on such practices in standards development organizations" (Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 — S. 3952 bill text (introduced February 26, 2026)).
The bill enumerates seventeen functions for the Center, carried out in coordination with NIST's laboratories. They include assessing AI systems "[u]sing publicly available or voluntarily provided information" and developing guidelines and best practices for their secure development, deployment and use; supporting red-teaming and establishing blue-teaming capabilities; developing voluntary guidelines for synthetic-content detection, provenance tracking and watermarking; cataloging and testing AI evaluation metrics; "[p]roducing resources for Federal agencies to conduct their own evaluations of artificial intelligence systems"; examining safeguards against the use of AI to develop chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and energy-security threats; providing, with DHS and CISA, an AI cybersecurity incident toolkit; and examining hardware supply-chain vulnerabilities, including in semiconductors and microelectronics. Section 22B would also establish a "Center for Artificial Intelligence Standards and Innovation Consortium" of academic, laboratory, industry and civil-society stakeholders, consulted at least quarterly; direct NIST to support "voluntary, consensus-based technical standards for testing artificial intelligence system components"; exempt confidential content that private contributors provide from the Freedom of Information Act and limit access to it to the contributor and the Center; and bar entities "under the ownership, control, or influence of the government of a covered nation" from the Center's resources. Its rule of construction reads: "Nothing in this section shall be construed to provide the Director any enforcement authority that was not in effect on the day before the date of the enactment of the Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026." The text contains no authorization of appropriations for the Center (Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 — S. 3952 bill text (introduced February 26, 2026)).
A companion section of the bill would have NIST's Under Secretary and the Secretary of Energy, in coordination with NSF, run a joint testbed program at the National Laboratories that prioritizes security assessments of autonomous offensive cyber capabilities and CBRN threats, "including the establishment of and utilization of existing classified testbeds," and a "Voluntary Foundation Models Test Program" for vendors of foundation models and of agents and robots built on them. S. 3952 reintroduces S. 4178 of the 118th Congress, whose reported text in December 2024 would have codified the same body as the "Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute" with seven functions (Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 — S. 3952 bill text (introduced February 26, 2026)). As of September 17, 2026 the bill had been referred to Senate Commerce without committee action (Source: congress.gov); the Washington Post reported on September 14 that it would likely be on the roster of a Commerce markup Chair Ted Cruz sought for September 23 (Source: washingtonpost.com). The Software & Information Industry Association, in a statement supporting the bill, said CAISI lacks the resourcing of the UK AI Security Institute, "which has 10x more staff and 10x more funding" (Source: commerce.senate.gov). The House Obernolte–Trahan discussion draft would also authorize the Center, with a $100 million annual budget.
Proposed statutory design
OpenAI's June 2026 blueprint proposes authorizing CAISI "as a permanent institution with clear statutory authorities and sufficient funding to conduct frontier model evaluations, develop safety standards, certify third-party assessors, and coordinate with national" partners — while confining its role to evaluation and recommendation: "CAISI's role should be to conduct evaluations and recommend mitigations — not to approve or block deployments." It further proposes a statutory evaluation deadline, after which "if CAISI fails to complete an evaluation within the defined time period due to bandwidth, hardware, personnel, or other constraints, developers should be permitted to deploy without penalty." This is the sharpest structural divergence from Anthropic's framework, which contemplates an Agency able to fine, prohibit further deployment, and in extreme cases restrict access to deployed models.
Alongside authorization and appropriation, the blueprint sets out four further foundational measures. The CAISI Director "should report directly to the US Secretary of Commerce or another senior Cabinet-level official," with White House coordination of staffing and operational support across departments. Hiring authorities "similar to those used by CHIPS for America" would permit rapid technical recruitment at competitive compensation, alongside temporary tours of duty for outside researchers — a proposal that speaks to the $15 million budget against an estimated $84 million need reported above. National security and scientific agencies would be directed to "immediately make available personnel and data related to cyber, CBRN, and other national security domains." And CAISI would obtain "access to classified computing environments capable of conducting frontier model evaluations," through dedicated infrastructure, interagency partnerships, or agreements with agencies or commercial providers.
The blueprint would also make CAISI the certifying body for an assessor market rather than the sole assessor. It asks CAISI to develop standards for independent technical assessments, "establish a certification process for qualified third-party assessors," and require frontier developers above specified capability thresholds to undergo periodic assessments by certified organizations, with findings reported to CAISI. To build that market, CAISI would be authorized "to provide grants, cooperative agreements, and other forms of support to emerging assessment organizations, academic centers, and technical institutions" — a construction that bears on the accredited-verifier proposals discussed above (see Independent Verification Organizations (IVOs)). Stated first priorities for these assessments are recursive self-improvement progress, "highly capable internal deployments, frontier model security, internal monitoring practices, and the effectiveness of associated safeguards" (see Rogue Internal Deployment).
Two August 2026 proposals from outside industry assign CAISI different roles. The IFP report of August 6, 2026 makes CAISI the implementing body for seven of its 23 recommendations, and treats resourcing as the binding constraint: Congress should fund it at a minimum of $84 million per year — the figure IFP had recommended previously, alongside a staff of 184, and against the America First Policy Institute's recommendation of $50–100 million per year — with the authors describing this as a minimum bar rather than a target. They argue autonomy and business model matter more than size, proposing a direct line of communication to a senior White House or cabinet-level official, authority to forward-deploy staff into frontier AI companies to increase visibility into major research projects and internal deployments, authority to organize third-party evaluators and data producers, and authority to contract directly with frontier developers to support priority research and security work, including compute subsidies for alignment teams. Further recommendations would have CAISI develop guidelines for managing the risks of rapid AI capability improvement and co-lead an AI Verification Consortium with industry.
ARI's August 10, 2026 blueprint gives CAISI a narrower, advisory role and places regulatory authority elsewhere. CAISI supplies technical assistance toward a workable capabilities-based definition of a frontier model, to replace the compute threshold as that proxy degrades, and contributes technical analysis to each standards-setting cycle; the assurance and enforcement functions sit with a regulator the blueprint does not fix, offering the Department of Commerce as one option and a distribution across several agencies as another.
A House discussion draft circulated on August 31, 2026, the Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act, would legislate on the same subject through the section that carries CAISI's authorities. It amends section 22A of the NIST Act (15 U.S.C. 278h–1) to direct the Director to assess trends in AI capabilities, naming a system's capability "to autonomously facilitate or conduct research on or development of an artificial intelligence system," and prohibits the Director from entering a memorandum of understanding for pre-deployment evaluation of a frontier system unless the memorandum requires the developer to disclose on request how far AI systems were used in developing that system — a metric kept in the ordinary course of business, an estimate of use without human review, and the methodology behind it — and unless the evaluation covers the system's own autonomous AI research and development capability (Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act — discussion draft bill text (August 31, 2026)). The obligation runs against the Director rather than against developers, so its reach depends on how many developers seek pre-deployment evaluation at all. The text located is an unnumbered discussion draft naming only Representative George Whitesides, though trade coverage attributed it to Representatives Pat Harrigan and Whitesides jointly and described it as introduced.
Measuring recursive self-improvement is the blueprint's most specific technical ask of the agency. It states that policymakers "currently have limited visibility into RSI progress, whether safeguards are keeping pace, or what indicators should inform future policy decisions," directs CAISI to work with developers, academics, national security agencies and international partners "to rapidly develop methodologies, benchmarks, and indicators for measuring RSI," and adds: "we encourage CAISI to treat RSI as an urgent priority." See Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI).
Relationships
- related: Liccardo–Kiley U.S.–China frontier AI safety negotiations bill (2026) — proposed $100 million international standards initiative.
- related: How Should the US Prepare for Increasingly Automated AI R&D? (IFP, August 2026) — names CAISI in seven of 23 recommendations and proposes an $84M/184-staff floor
- related: Responsible Innovation at the Frontier (ARI, August 2026) — assigns CAISI technical assistance on a capabilities-based frontier definition
- related: Building Standards for the Next Phase of AI (OpenAI, September 2026) — proposes CAISI and the institute network as the channel for international frontier-AI standards
- related: International AI Standards, International AI Safety Institute Network (INSAI / AISIN)
- part-of: US Department of Commerce, NIST
- predecessor: AI Safety Institute (AISI; pre-2025 rename)
- maintains: NIST AI Risk Management Framework 1.0
- publishes: NIST AI 800-4: Challenges to the Monitoring of Deployed AI Systems and other NIST AI series
- related: UK AI Safety Institute (AI Security Institute), EU AI Office (international counterparts)
- related: Self-Improving AI Monitoring Act — would condition the Director's pre-deployment evaluation agreements on autonomous-AI-R&D disclosure
- related: Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 (S. 3952), Future of Artificial Intelligence Innovation Act of 2026 — S. 3952 bill text (introduced February 26, 2026) — S. 3952 would establish the Center in statute as NIST Act § 22B
- related: Todd Young — sponsor of S. 3952
- related: Post-Deployment AI System Monitoring, Standards as Litigation Evidence