Emil Michael, who serves as senior technology official at the Department of Defense, is once again in the spotlight for the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly published podcast interview offers one of the most detailed looks yet at his thinking on that dispute, as well as an unsuspecting settling of old scores from his Uber days.
The interview, published Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a Kleiner Perkins partner who leads the venture firm’s portfolio operations team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history, and was recorded before the Defense Department’s dispute with Anthropic came to a head. But it was Michael’s comments about his departure from Uber (and his barely concealed bitterness about it) that caught our attention first.
When Mirzadegan asked him directly if he had been shown the door with Travis Kalanick, Michael responded with one word: “Indeed.”
Miguel resigned eight days before Kalanick did so in June 2017, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation sparked by allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in those allegations, but the investigation, led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, concluded that he should be removed. Kalanick followed, ejected in what The New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by some of the company’s most prominent investors, including Benchmark.
When Mirzadegan asked him if he was still “salty” about it, Michael wasn’t wrong. “I will never forget or forgive him,” he said.
The ouster irritates both Michael and Kalanick not only because of the personal damage to their reputations, but because they believed – and still believe – that autonomous driving was the future of Uber, and that the investors who forced them to resign killed it.
During the interview, Michael argued that the decision was driven by a desire to protect short-term returns rather than build something lasting.
Technology event
San Francisco, CA
|
October 13-15, 2026
“They wanted to preserve their inherent profits, rather than trying to turn this company into a trillion-dollar company,” he said.
Kalanick has been equally clear. 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 gap narrowing. “You could say, ‘I wish we had an autonomous ride-hailing product right now.’ That would be great”he told the audience.
Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely perceived as a clearance sale in 2020, three years after both men left. The decision seemed defensible at the time; Autonomous driving burned money and the technology seemed very distant. Now Waymo robotaxis are operating in 10 US Cities and expand into new markets. Whether Uber ever had the staying power to get there is an open question, but it’s clearly one that still haunts both men.
For his part, Kalanick never stopped building. this month the he took off the bandages Atoms, a robotics company he has been developing by stealth since leaving Uber eight years ago. He also revealed that he is the largest investor in Pronto, a start-up of autonomous vehicles focused on industrial and mining sites founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he is close to acquiring it outright.
Meanwhile, Michael has found a new battle front. The interview was recorded just before the Defense Department’s negotiations with Anthropic publicly collapsed, and his account of that confrontation is worth listening to. It describes Anthropic as one of the few providers of large language models approved for the department, approved in part through its partnerships with Palantir. As Michael puts it, the Department of Defense is not a free-for-all. It operates under such a dense web of laws, regulations and internal policies that “we are almost drowning in them,” he tells Mirzadegan. Anthropic, he maintains, wants to add its own layer on top of all that.
“What I can’t do is have a company impose its own political preferences above the laws and my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to make his point. “If you buy Microsoft Office Suite, they don’t tell you what you can type in a Word document or what email you can send.”
Then Michael went further, invoking a finding that Anthropic himself had published last month before his conversation with Mirzadegan. Chinese technology companies, he argued, had been attacking Anthropic’s models repeatedly with a technique called distillation, essentially reverse engineering the model’s behavior close enough to replicate its capabilities.
through china civil-military fusion lawsThat, he said, would give the People’s Liberation Army access to something functionally equivalent to Anthropic’s full, unrestricted model. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense would be working with a version limited by Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I would be one-handed, strapped to my back against an anthropic model that is fully capable… by an adversary,” Michael said. “It’s totally Orwellian.”
Michael added a little later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic: “If you’re an American champion (and I think you are, it’s one of the biggest companies in the country), don’t you want to help your War Department succeed with the best tools available?”
As industry observers 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 intensified further last weekfiling a 40-page brief with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The report argued that giving Anthropic access to the Defense Department’s warfighting infrastructure would introduce “unacceptable risk” to its supply chains, in part because the company could theoretically disable or alter its own technology to suit its interests rather than those of the country in times of war.
anthropic responded on Fridayfiling affidavits, along with a brief, arguing that the government’s case is based on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never raised during months of previous negotiations. One such statement, filed by Anthropic’s public sector head, Thiyagu Ramasamy, directly challenged the government’s claim that Anthropic could interfere with military operations by disabling or altering the behavior of its technology, something Ramasamy says is not technically possible.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.
