White House Reverses Course on AI Regulation, Signals Partnership Over Rules

May 8, 2026

White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett announced on May 7, 2026 that the Trump administration is studying a possible executive order creating a road map for AI evaluation before release. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), led by Chris Fall since late April 2026, has partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and xAI to evaluate models pre-deployment. Congress approved $55 million for NIST AI research in January 2026.

CAISI partnerships with AI companies

▪The Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) announced partnerships with Google, Microsoft, and xAI to evaluate some AI models before deployment.
▪CAISI has completed more than 40 evaluations, including on state-of-the-art models that remain unreleased.

Policy reversal from Biden era

▪Elizabeth Kelly, the inaugural director of the U.S. AI Safety Institute, stepped down shortly after Trump's inauguration in January 2025.
▪Chris Fall served as an Energy Department official in the first Trump administration.
▪Elizabeth Kelly joined Anthropic as head of "beneficial deployments" after stepping down from the U.S. AI Safety Institute.
▪Joe Biden's November 2023 AI Executive Order invoked the Defense Production Act to require companies training the largest AI models to share certain safety testing results with the government.
▪Rumman Chowdhury stated that the Trump administration's shift represents "a 180" for an administration that has very explicitly been anti-any sort of regulation and has explicitly tried to block states from enacting any kind of regulation.
▪The Trump administration systematically rebranded and restructured the U.S. AI Safety Institute, notably removing the word "safety" from its name.
▪Rumman Chowdhury is CEO of Humane Intelligence and former US Science Envoy for AI.
▪The original U.S. AI Safety Institute was created by Joe Biden through his November 2023 AI Executive Order with the goal of helping the federal government evaluate and better understand frontier AI systems from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
▪Chris Fall was tapped at the end of April 2026 to lead the rebranded CAISI.

National security framing shift

▪White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on May 7, 2026 that the Trump administration is studying a possible executive order that would create "a clear road map" for how advanced AI systems should be evaluated before release.
▪Kevin Hassett compared the proposed AI evaluation process to FDA drug approval, stating that future AIs that could potentially create vulnerabilities should go through a process so that they're released after they've been proven safe.

CAISI funding constraints

▪Chuck Schumer announced that an appropriations bill included up to $10 million for the establishment of the U.S. AI Safety Institute at NIST.
▪In 2024, The Washington Post published an investigation finding that budget constraints had left the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) understaffed in key technology areas.
▪In January 2026, Congress approved $55 million for NIST AI research and measurement efforts.
▪America First Policy Institute stated that CAISI remains underfunded compared with peer institutes internationally and lacks "appropriate funding."
▪In January 2026, Congress approved up to $10 million specifically to expand CAISI.

AI evaluation limitations

▪In 2024, the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning (BIML) identified 23 LLM security risks that are located inside the black box of frontier models and thus managed by the vendors themselves.
▪Gary McGraw, CEO of the Berryville Institute of Machine Learning, stated that any regulatory guidance should systematically address LLM security risks by opening the black box to scrutiny.