Trump plans to move senior officials from AI testing agency into the White House, with a small team of 40 responsible for evaluating top-tier models.

Beating AI News Flash: The Trump administration plans to transfer 3 senior officials from CAISSI, the U.S. AI model testing agency, to the White House, reporting directly to White House science and technology policy chief Michael Kratsios and National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. Previously, the government had considered moving the entire agency into the White House, but ultimately chose to adjust only some senior personnel. The transfer has not yet been completed, and the identities of the 3 officials have not been disclosed.

CAISSI is under NIST, which is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. It has only about 40 employees and an annual budget of about $15 million, yet it undertakes important model safety evaluation work. According to people familiar with the matter, the agency is working with the U.S. National Security Agency to test OpenAI's Astra and Anthropic's Mythos before public release. It had previously publicly evaluated DeepSeek V4 Pro and Zhipu GLM-5.3. Google also confirmed that Gemini 4 Argon has participated in the U.S. government's pre-release voluntary testing process.

The agency has been in turmoil in recent years. Since it was established under the Biden administration, it has used 3 names in less than two years. In July of this year, its head, Chris Fall, resigned after only 3 months in office, and no successor has yet been determined. The White House hopes that through this adjustment, model testing experts will participate more directly in policy decisions.