The Trump Administration is on the verge of firing all ‘probationary’ employees in NIST, as they have done in many other places and departments, seemingly purely because they want to find people they can fire. But if you fire all the new employees and recently promoted employees (which is that ‘probationary’ means here) you end up firing quite a lot of the people who know about AI or give the government state capacity in AI.

This would gut not only America's AISI, its primary source of a wide variety of forms of state capacity and the only way we can have insight into what is happening or test for safety on matters involving classified information. It would also gut our ability to do a wide variety of other things, such as reinvigorating American semiconductor manufacturing. It would be a massive own goal for the United States, on every [...]