Emile Michael, a senior technology official at the Pentagon, is back in the spotlight over the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview provides the most in-depth look yet at his thoughts on the controversy, as well as unapologetically settling old scores from his Uber days.
The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Jubin Mirzadegan, a Kleiner Perkins partner who leads the venture’s portfolio management team, covers a wide range of topics, including policy and personal history, and was recorded before the Pentagon’s feud with Anthropic fully surfaced. But what first caught our attention was Michael’s comments about leaving Uber and his barely concealed bitterness about it.
When Mirzadegan asked him straight up if he was shown the door with Travis Kalanick, Michael responded with one word: “virtually.”
Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick resigned in June 2017, as part of a workplace investigation stemming from allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination within the company. Although he was not named in these allegations, an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder concluded that he should be removed from office. Mr. Kalanick followed suit, pushed out in what the New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by Benchmark and other of the company’s most prominent investors.
When Mirzadegan asked if he still had “salty feelings” about the matter, Michael was unambiguous. “I will never forget it and I will never forgive it,” he said.
The outcasts blasted Michael and Kalanick not just because their reputations were personally tarnished, but because they believed, and still believe, that self-driving is the future of Uber, and that the investors who forced them out killed self-driving.
Michael claimed in an interview that this decision was driven by a desire to protect short-term interests rather than building something permanent.
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“They wanted to preserve the embedded profits rather than trying to make this a trillion-dollar company,” he said.
Kalanick makes a similar point. At last year’s Abundance Summit in Los Angeles, he said the program was in second place behind Waymo at the time of cancellation, and the gap has closed. “You can say, ‘I wish we had a self-driving ride-sharing product right now. That would be great,'” he told the audience.
In 2020, three years after they left, Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely perceived as a fire sale. At the time, the decision seemed defensible. Autonomous driving was a waste of money and the technology felt very far away. Waymo’s robotaxis are currently operating in 10 U.S. cities and expanding into new markets. Whether Uber had the staying power to get there is an open question, but it’s clearly an issue that still bothers both men.
For his part, Kalanick never stopped building. This month, he revealed the secrets of Atoms, the robot company he has been secretly developing since leaving Uber eight years ago. He also revealed that he is the largest investor in Pronto, a self-driving car startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he was on the verge of acquiring the company outright.
Meanwhile, Michael has found a new front. This interview was recorded just before negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic broke down publicly, and his account of the conflict is worth listening to. He described Anthropic as one of the few large-scale language model vendors approved by the department, which was partially approved through a partnership with Palantir. As Michael says, the Department of Defense is by no means a free organization. It operates under such a dense web of laws, regulations and internal policies that “we are almost suffocated by them,” he told Mirzadegan. Anthropic wants to add its own layer on top of all of that, he insists.
“What I can’t do is allow certain companies to impose their policies on top of the law and internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to get his point across. “When you buy Microsoft Office Suite, it doesn’t tell you what you can write in a Word document or what kind of email you can send.”
Michael then went further, citing research published by Anthropic itself last month prior to his conversation with Mirzadegan. He claimed that Chinese technology companies had repeatedly attacked Anthropic’s models using a technique called distillation, essentially reproducing their functionality by rigorously reverse-engineering the model’s behavior.
He said that through China’s civil-military fusion law, the People’s Liberation Army will have access to the functional equivalent of Anthropic’s full and unrestricted model. The Department of Defense, meanwhile, will be working with a version that follows Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I would be a one-armed, fully capable humanoid model with my hands tied behind my back by an adversary,” Michael said. “That’s totally Orwellian.”
Michael added a little later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic. “If you are a champion of America, and I believe they are one of the most important businesses in this country, wouldn’t you want to help the Department of the Army succeed with the best tools available?”
As industry watchers well know, the dispute has since moved from the negotiating table to the courts.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a “supply chain risk” in late February, and the government escalated the matter further last week, filing a 40-page brief in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argues that giving Anthropic access to the Pentagon’s war infrastructure would pose an “unacceptable risk” to its supply chain, in part because the company could theoretically disable or modify its technology, rather than the nation’s, in wartime.
Antropic fired back Friday, filing a sworn statement with briefs, arguing that the government’s lawsuit is based on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never raised in previous months of negotiations. One of these declarations, filed by Anthropic’s head of public affairs, Thyag Ramasamy, directly challenges the government’s claim that Anthropic can interfere with military operations by disabling or changing the operation of its technology, which Ramasamy claims is technically impossible.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.
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