Emil Michael, a senior technology official at the Department of Defense, is back in the spotlight over the government’s ongoing fight with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview offers the most detailed look yet at his thoughts on the dispute and offers a nonchalant settlement of old scores from his Uber days.
The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the venture firm’s portfolio operations team, covered a variety of topics, including policy and personal history, and was recorded before the DoD-Anthropic feud had fully reached its peak. But what first caught our attention was Michael’s comments about leaving Uber and his barely concealed bitterness.
When Mirzadegan asked him if he showed him the door with Travis Kalanick, Michael responded with one word: “effectively.”
Michael resigned eight days ago as a result of a workplace investigation sparked by Kalanick’s June 2017 allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in the charges, but an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder concluded he should be removed. Kalanick followed suit, pushing back on what The New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by the company’s most prominent investors, including Benchmark.
When Mirzadegan asked if he still had “salt” about it, Michael was unambiguous. “I will never forget that and I will never forgive it,” he said.
Michael and Kalanick’s ouster is jarring for both of them, not only because of the damage to their personal reputations, but also because they believed (and still believe) that self-driving is Uber’s future and that the investors who drove them out killed Uber.
In an interview, Michael claimed that the decision was driven by a desire to protect short-term profits rather than build something lasting.
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“They wanted to preserve the inherent profits rather than try to make this a trillion-dollar company,” he said.
Kalanick was equally pointed out. At the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles last year, he said the program was second only to Waymo when it was canceled and closed the gap. “You can say, ‘I wish we had a self-driving car sharing product right now. That would be really cool,’” he told the audience.
Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in 2020, three years after the pair passed away. The decision seemed defensible at the time. Self-driving was a cash burner and the technology felt very remote. Waymo’s robotaxi now operates in 10 U.S. cities and is expanding into new markets. Whether Uber had the power to get there is an open question, but it’s clearly something that still haunts the pair.
Kalanick never stopped building. This month he unveiled Atoms, the robotics company he has been developing in secret since he left Uber eight years ago. He is also the largest investor in Pronto, a self-driving car startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, which he said was on the verge of being acquired outright.
Meanwhile, Michael has discovered a new front. The interview was recorded just before DoD’s negotiations with Anthropic broke down publicly, and his account of the standoff is worth hearing. He describes Anthropic as one of the few large-scale language model vendors approved by the department, receiving approval in part through its partnership with Palantir. As Michael frames it, the DoD is never free. “We operate under an almost suffocating web of laws, regulations and internal policies,” he tells Mirzadegan. He claims Anthropic wants to add its own layer on top of all that.
“What I cannot do is allow any one company to impose their policy preferences on top of the law and my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to make his point. “When you buy the Microsoft Office suite, it doesn’t tell you what you can write in a Word document or what emails you can send.”
Michael further referenced the results released by Anthropic itself last month prior to his conversation with Mirzadegan. He claimed that Chinese technology companies have repeatedly attacked Anthropic’s model through a technique called distillation. This is essentially reverse engineering the behavior of the model closely enough to replicate its functionality.
He said China’s civil-military fusion law would give the People’s Liberation Army access to a functional equivalent of Anthropic’s complete and unrestricted model. Meanwhile, DoD will work with a version bound by Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I would be one-armed and strapped behind my back against a fully capable model of humanity,” Michael said. “It’s completely Orwellian.”
Michael added later in the interview before moving on to the next topic: “If you are the champion of America, and I believe they are one of the most important companies in America, wouldn’t you want to help the War Department succeed with the best tools available?”
As industry insiders know, disputes have moved from the negotiating table to the courts.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed humans a “supply chain risk” in late February, and the government expanded further last week, filing a 40-page brief in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The report argued that giving humanity access to the DoD’s war infrastructure would create “unacceptable risks” to supply chains, in part because companies could theoretically disable or alter their own technology to suit their own interests rather than those of the nation in the event of war.
Anthropic fired back on Friday, filing a sworn declaration outlining its claims, arguing the government’s claims rested on technical misunderstandings and claims not raised during months of previous negotiations. One of the declarations, submitted by Anthropic’s public sector director, Thiyagu Ramasamy, directly challenged the government’s claim that Anthropic could disrupt military operations by disabling or altering the way its technology operates. Ramasamy says this is technically impossible.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.
