Express Interest in Working With CAISI

Over the coming months, the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI), at the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), will be engaging a wide range of AI experts to help us deliver on America’s AI Action Plan.

CAISI is leading a number of exciting initiatives and will be offering multiple ways to get involved (e.g., federal hiring, guest researcher arrangements, non-profit collaborations). This page presents some of those initiatives and a way for you to express interest in working with us.

About CAISI

CAISI works within NIST at the Department of Commerce, and has been designated by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick to serve as industry’s primary point of contact within the U.S. government for testing and research on frontier AI.  Under President Trump’s AI Action Plan, CAISI received seventeen taskings spanning AI security research, national security evaluations, analysis of global AI competition, measurement science, interagency coordination on AI, and developing voluntary standards.

Leading AI companies partner with CAISI on a voluntary basis for support in evaluating their most capable models prior to deployment. CAISI also maintains close partnerships across the federal government, including the intelligence community, and has built a premier reputation within the U.S. government.

Example Initiatives

In line with taskings from Secretary Lutnick and the AI Action Plan, example initiatives include:

• AI security: Measuring and improving the security of AI systems.
  • Assessing susceptibility to attacks such as prompt injections and jailbreaks, and the feasibility of backdoor detection
  • Manual and automated red-teaming of AI agent systems
  • Technical work and writing to support development of AI security guidelines
• Guidelines and voluntary standards: Developing useful resources for the AI industry and government agencies, on topics including:
  • The security and robustness of AI systems and mitigating potential vulnerabilities when deploying AI agents
  • Ensuring that AI evaluations are informative and reproducible
• AI capability evaluations in cyber, chemistry, and biology: Developing, running, and interpreting evaluations in order to understand impacts on national security.
  • Cyber: automated and human-assisted evaluation of capabilities for vulnerability research, exploit development, and cyber workflow automation
  • Biology: evaluation of computational chemical and biological capabilities, including biomolecular prediction and design
  • Collaborating with subject matter experts within government, AI industry, and AI evaluators to improve measurement methodologies
• Assessing the state of AI: Producing reports, briefings, and memos on the AI landscape including:
  • Overall assessments of US and foreign AI capabilities and how those capabilities may evolve
  • Evaluations of general capabilities and their impacts on national security
  • Measuring foreign political bias in models
• Advancing measurement science: Developing improved methods for rigorously evaluating AI system characteristics (e.g., capabilities, functionality, and reliability).
  • Assessing practices for automated scoring (e.g., LLM-as-judge)
  • Vetting measurement instruments, such as benchmarks, for statistical validity
  • Building a comprehensive, technical report on rigorous uncertainty estimation leveraging statistical models
• Measurement in application: Multidisciplinary measurement of AI systems in real-world settings, in application or post-deployment.
  • Uplift studies to measure AI-driven productivity across a range of tasks
  • Comparison field testing to gather user preferences on AI systems in real workflows

Location

CAISI operates offices located in downtown San Francisco and Washington, D.C. We offer flexible working hours and a comprehensive Federal benefits program.

What CAISI looks for

CAISI operates as a startup within government, focused on impact in the national interest.

We’re seeking:

• Technical excellence: software engineers, AI research engineers, and AI research scientists
• Domain expertise: cyber experts, biosecurity experts, computational and structural biologists
• Scientific rigor: experienced researchers with expertise in methods for measurement and validation of AI systems in real settings
• Other talent with a passion for AI: if you think there’s a chance you might be a good fit for working with CAISI, please do register interest.

Get in touch

Register your interest using this short form.

The Department of Commerce is an Equal Opportunity Employer.