planned layoffs affecting NIST staff

AI safety advocates slam Trump administration’s reported targeting of standards agency | Fortune Home 
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 Tech AI AI safety advocates slam Trump administration’s reported targeting of standards agency

 By David Meyer David Meyer Down Arrow Button Icon By David Meyer David Meyer Down Arrow Button Icon February 20, 2025, 12:53 PM ET Add us on President Donald Trump delivers remarks at his Mar-a-Lago resort on Feb. 18, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. Joe Raedle—Getty Images When he returned to the presidency of the United States, one of the first things Donald Trump did was to rescind President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI safety. But that move did not undo Biden’s creation of the U.S. AI Safety Institute.

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 Now it seems the institute is effectively done for anyway. On Wednesday, Axios and Bloomberg both reported that the Trump administration is about to fire as many as 500 staffers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), whose roughly 3,400 employees include the AI Safety Institute (AISI) and its staff.

 As is the way with many of the cuts currently being undertaken by the administration and its Elon Musk–led DOGE “efficiency“ team, the targets are workers who are still on probation—typically a one-year period after their start dates at U.S. agencies.

 

 For AISI—a body tasked with developing standards and guidelines for safe AI and evaluating the security of new models—this may prove fatal, as it is a relatively new organization where most of the staffers are still on probation. (The same applies to the part of NIST that has been administering the Biden-era CHIPS Act funding program for semiconductor manufacturers who onshore manufacturing in the U.S.)

 AISI works with most of the country’s big AI companies to develop its guidelines and standards. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google , Apple , and Meta all signed up to help around a year ago, though Musk’s AI-focused businesses—xAI and Tesla—did not.

 “Eliminating the AI Safety Institute would do nothing to make U.S. AI companies more competitive—and would undermine efforts to make sure that AI tools are safe and effective,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology. “The AI Safety Institute was designed to play a basic, commonsense role coordinating the kind of work that needs to happen for the entire industry to succeed.”

 Neither NIST nor the Commerce Department, of which it is part, had responded to Fortune ’s request for comment at the time of publication.

 

 ‘A gift to China’

 “These cuts, if confirmed, would severely impact the government’s capacity to research and address critical AI safety concerns at a time when such expertise is more vital than ever,” said Jason Green-Lowe, the executive director of the Center for AI Policy.

 Green-Lowe said the move would deprive the country “of the eyes and ears we need to identify when AI i

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