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Emil Michael, who serves as a senior technology official<\/a> at the Department of Defense, is back in the spotlight over the government\u2019s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview<\/a> offers one of the most detailed looks yet into his thinking on that dispute \u2014 as well as an unguarded settling of old scores from his Uber days.<\/p>\n The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the venture firm\u2019s portfolio operating team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history \u2014 and was recorded before the DoD\u2019s feud with Anthropic had fully come to a head. But it is Michael\u2019s remarks about his departure from Uber \u2014 and his barely concealed bitterness about it \u2014 that grabbed our attention first.<\/p>\n When Mirzadegan asked him point-blank whether he had been shown the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael answered with a single word: \u201cEffectively.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael resigned<\/a> eight days before Kalanick did, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation triggered by allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in those allegations, but the inquiry \u2014 led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder \u2014 concluded he should be removed. Kalanick followed, pushed out in what the New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by some of the company\u2019s most prominent investors, including Benchmark.<\/p>\n When Mirzadegan asked whether he was still \u201csalty\u201d about it, Michael didn\u2019t equivocate. \u201cI\u2019ll never forget that, nor forgive,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The ouster grates on both Michael and Kalanick not only because of the personal damage to their reputations but because they believed \u2014 and still believe \u2014 that autonomous driving was Uber\u2019s future, and that the investors who forced them out killed it. <\/p>\n During the interview, Michael argued the decision was driven by a desire to protect near-term returns rather than build something lasting. <\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tSan Francisco, CA<\/span> \u201cThey wanted to preserve their embedded gains, rather than try to make this a trillion dollar company,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Kalanick has been equally pointed. At the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles last year, he said the program was second only to Waymo at the time of its cancellation and closing the gap. \u201cYou could say, \u2018Wish we had an autonomous ride-sharing product right now. That would be great<\/a>,\u2019\u201d he told the audience.<\/p>\n Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely perceived as a fire sale<\/a> in 2020, three years after both men were gone. The decision looked defensible at the time; autonomous driving was burning cash, and the tech felt very distant. Now Waymo\u2019s robotaxis are operating in 10 U.S. cities<\/a> and expanding into new markets. Whether Uber ever had the staying power to get there is an open question, but it\u2019s clearly one that still haunts both men.<\/p>\n For his part, Kalanick never really stopped building. This month he took the wraps off<\/a> Atoms, a robotics company he has been developing in stealth since around the time he left Uber eight years ago. He also revealed he is the largest investor in Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup<\/a> focused on industrial and mining sites founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he is on the verge of acquiring it outright.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Michael has found a new battlefront. The interview was recorded just before the DoD\u2019s negotiations with Anthropic publicly collapsed, and his account of that standoff is worth a listen. He describes Anthropic as one of only a handful of approved large language model vendors for the department, approved in part through its partnerships with Palantir. As Michael frames it, the DoD is hardly a free-for-all. It operates under such a dense web of laws, regulations, and internal policies that \u201cwe almost choke on them,\u201d he tells Mirzadegan. Anthropic, he argues, wants to add its own layer on top of all of that.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I can\u2019t do is have any one company impose their own policy preferences on top of the laws and on top of my internal policies,\u201d he said, using an analogy to make his point. \u201cIf you buy the Microsoft Office Suite, they don\u2019t tell you what you could write in a Word document, or what email you can send.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael then went further, invoking a finding Anthropic itself had published<\/a> last month ahead of his conversation with Mirzadegan. Chinese technology companies, he argued, had been hitting Anthropic\u2019s models repeatedly in a technique called distillation \u2014 essentially reverse-engineering the model\u2019s behavior closely enough to replicate its capabilities. <\/p>\n Through China\u2019s civil-military fusion laws<\/a>, he said, that would give the People\u2019s Liberation Army access to something functionally equivalent to Anthropic\u2019s full, unrestricted model. Meanwhile, the DoD would be working with a version hemmed in by Anthropic\u2019s own guidelines. \u201cI\u2019d be one-armed, tied behind my back against an Anthropic model that\u2019s fully capable \u2014 by an adversary,\u201d Michael said. \u201cIt\u2019s totally Orwellian.\u201d<\/p>\n Michael added a bit later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic: \u201cIf you\u2019re an American champion \u2014 and I believe they are, they\u2019re one of the most important companies in the country \u2014 don\u2019t you want to help your Department of War succeed with the best tools available?\u201d<\/p>\n As industry watchers are well aware, the dispute has since moved from negotiating table to courtroom. <\/p>\n Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a \u201csupply-chain risk\u201d in late February, and the government escalated further last week<\/a>, filing a 40-page brief in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argued that giving Anthropic access to the DoD\u2019s war-fighting infrastructure would introduce \u201cunacceptable risk\u201d into its supply chains in part because the company could theoretically disable or alter its own technology to suit its interests rather than the country\u2019s in a time of war.<\/p>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tOctober 13-15, 2026<\/span>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n