On behalf of the Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute (CLSI), the Expert Panel on Microbiology would like to respond to the recent commentary by Kirby and colleagues voicing concerns related to the verification of commercial antimicrobial susceptibility testing (AST) for new drugs that are introduced into the clinical laboratory (1). The CLSI Expert Panel on Microbiology oversees the direction and general guidance of the CLSI microbiology subcommittees, including the Subcommittee on Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing, the Subcommittee on Antifungal Susceptibility Testing, and the Subcommittee on Veterinary Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing. The authors of the recent commentary propose that verification studies are not needed when new drugs are added to commercial antimicrobial susceptibility test systems such as commercial panels and disk diffusion testing if the test systems have been previously verified. Instead, the authors argue that a laboratory could only perform recommended quality control (QC) testing and then implement testing and reporting of the new antimicrobials without further verification. The intent of this approach is to support easier implementation of new drug AST in an era of extensive antimicrobial resistance, when the use of new antimicrobials may be necessary to save the lives of patients suffering from otherwise untreatable infections.