Trump admin removes Collin Burns

The White House forced out Collin Burns from the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation on Thursday, four days after he started the job on Monday. (washingtonpost.com) (pcmag.com) Burns previously worked at Anthropic and OpenAI, and his personal site identifies him as an Anthropic researcher who earlier worked at OpenAI and studied at the University of California, Berkeley. (collinpburns.com) (openreview.net) The Washington Post reported that White House officials were concerned about Burns’s past work at Anthropic, which has clashed with the Trump administration in recent months. (washingtonpost.com) (pcmag.com) The office Burns briefly led is housed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, or NIST, inside the Commerce Department. NIST says the center is the federal government’s main point of contact with industry for testing and collaborative research on commercial AI systems. (nist.gov) NIST says the Center for AI Standards and Innovation develops guidelines and best practices to improve AI security, helps industry build voluntary standards, and leads unclassified evaluations of advanced models that could pose national security risks. (nist.gov) That center is new. NIST says Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in June 2025 ordered the Biden-era U.S. AI Safety Institute to be remade as the Center for AI Standards and Innovation. (nist.gov 1) (nist.gov 2) The administration had already signaled a different direction by dropping “Safety” from the institute’s name and recasting the office around standards, testing, and industry coordination. (nist.gov) (nbcnews.com) Another outlet, The Daily Signal, reported before The Washington Post story that Commerce had decided to go with Dr. Chris Fall instead of Burns to lead the center. A Commerce official told that outlet the department “decided to go in a different direction.” (dailysignal.com) NIST has continued building the center while the leadership changed. In February, it announced an AI Agent Standards Initiative through the same office and said CAISI would coordinate with other federal partners on industry-led standards and protocols. (nist.gov) The four-day hiring reversal leaves the administration still needing a durable leader for the office that writes AI testing guidance and works with companies building the most advanced systems. (washingtonpost.com) (nist.gov)