US removes ‘safety’ from AI Safety Institute

The US Department of Commerce has renamed its AI Safety Institute to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), shifting its focus from overall safety to combating national security risks and preventing “burdensome and unnecessary regulation” abroad. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick announced the change on June 3rd, calling the agency’s overhaul a way to “evaluate and enhance US innovation” and “ensure US dominance of international AI standards.”

The AI Safety Institute was announced in 2023 under former President Joe Biden, part of a global effort to create best practices for governments mitigating AI system risk. It signed memorandums of understanding with major US AI companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, to get access to new models and suggest improvements before release. Near the end of Biden’s term in early 2025, it released draft guidelines for managing AI risks that included using systems to create biological weapons or other clear threats to national security, but also more common categories of harmful content like child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

Lutnick’s statement says that the new institute will “focus on demonstrable risks, such as cybersecurity, biosecurity, and chemical weapons” in its evaluations. It will also investigate “malign foreign influence arising from use of adversaries’ AI systems,” a category that likely includes DeepSeek, a Chinese large language model that shook up the American AI industry earlier this year.

The move is part of a larger Trump administration effort to accelerate the expansion of American AI companies. On his first day in office Trump rescinded a Biden executive order that ordered new safety standards for large AI systems and a report evaluating the potential risks for US consumers and the labor market. His own executive orders have encouraged increasing generative AI adoption in fields like education and promoting coal as a source of power for energy-hungry AI data centers. And the current Republican budget bill includes a 10-year moratorium on state-level AI regulations — a provision even some in Trump’s party have come to oppose.