Collin Burns, a researcher, moved to Washington, D.C., last week for a job that doesn’t exist anymore, at least not for him. He quit Anthropic, packed his things, and started the onboarding process at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation in the Commerce Department. After four days, he was fired. It turned out that the reason was the company he had left to get the job.
Burns had worked at OpenAI and Anthropic before, which are two of the best AI labs in the country. In a different time, that resume would have been seen as a strong qualification for a government job evaluating cutting edge AI models. His ties to Anthropic, on the other hand, seem to have been enough to end the appointment before it even started.
It has not been easy for the Trump administration to work with Anthropic. President Trump called the company “left-wing nut jobs” in public in February after it refused to remove safety guardrails from its AI so that it could be used in self-driving weapons and surveillance. Right after that, the Pentagon called Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” which is a very serious term in Washington right now. It is said that the White House found out after the fact that Burns had just come from Anthropic, which changed the calculations very quickly.
At the senior level, it’s possible that no one signed off on the hire after getting all the facts. Some White House officials are said to have said they didn’t know much about Burns’ background before he quit his job in the private sector and moved to D.C. It’s pretty amazing that they did that, and it makes me wonder how vetting works when political tensions rise faster than paperwork.
There is a lot of history behind the job Burns was taking on. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation used to be called the AI Safety Institute. It was founded in November 2023 by Vice President Joe Biden. In June of last year, Trump’s team changed the name. Howard Lutnick, who is Secretary of Commerce, said that the change was a rejection of too much government regulation. “For far too long,” Lutnick stated, “censorship and regulations have been used under the guise of national security.” The name change was enough to show where to go. Of course, the person chosen to lead it is a whole different signal.
That job has now been given to Dr. Chris Fall, who was director of the Office of Science at the Department of Energy during the first Trump administration. In Washington, fall is a known thing, which is exactly the point. A spokesman for the Commerce Department said that he would bring “the scientific leadership needed to make sure that America leads the world in evaluating cutting edge AI models.”” Not mentioned in the statement—and it didn’t need to—was that Fall doesn’t have any ties to Anthropic as a company.
But there’s something almost silly about the timing. Along with Burns’s quiet firing, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei met with White House officials that same week. In a later TV interview, President Trump said that he and they had “very good talks” and that he thought everything would work out. Kind words were said to the former Anthropic worker while he was probably cleaning up his desk after a job that lasted less than a week.
Director of the Foundation for American Innovation Dean W. Ball, who used to work as an AI advisor for Trump, said on social media that Burns had been “rewarded by his country with a punch in the face.” It’s a direct evaluation that’s probably right. Burns left a job at one of the most important AI labs in the world to work for the government. He then got caught in a political standoff that he had nothing to do with making.
The most important thing that this episode shows is how quickly the lines of disagreement in Washington have become clear when it comes to AI policy. In terms of AI, the government wants to be the leader. It also doesn’t want to be too close to people who work for companies that don’t fully support its national security goals. Getting these two goals to work together is harder than anyone in this administration has made it seem.
