Emil Michael, now a top Pentagon official, says he will never forgive the Uber investors who ousted him and Kalanick

Emil Michael, who serves as the Defense Department’s chief technology official, is back in the spotlight over the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview offers one of the most detailed looks yet at his thinking on that dispute — as well as an unguarded settling of old scores from his days at Uber.

The interview, released on Monday and conducted last month by Gobin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the firm’s investment portfolio operating team, covered a range of topics including politics and personal history — and was recorded before the MoD’s spat with Anthropic came to a head. But it was Michael’s statements about his departure from Uber — and his barely concealed bitterness — that first caught our attention.

When Mirzadegan asked him directly if he showed him the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael answered with one word: “Effectively.”

Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation sparked by allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. His name was not mentioned in these allegations, but the investigation led by former US Attorney General Eric Holder concluded that he should be impeached. Kalanick followed, and was fired in what The New York Times described as a shareholder revolt by some of the company’s most prominent investors, including Benchmark.

When Mirzadejan asked him if he was still “salty” on the matter, Michael did not equivocate. “I will never forget it, and I will never forgive,” he said.

The ouster angers both Michael and Kalanick, not just because of the personal damage to their reputations, but because they believed — and still believe — that self-driving was Uber’s future, and that the investors who forced them out killed that future.

During the interview, Michael said the decision was driven by a desire to protect near-term returns rather than building something permanent.

“They wanted to preserve their underlying gains, rather than try to make this a trillion-dollar company,” he said.

Kalanick noted the same. 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. “You could say, ‘I wish we had a standalone ride-sharing product right now. That would be great,'” he told the audience.

Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely seen as a fire sale in 2020, three years after the departure of the two men. The decision seemed justified at the time. Self-driving was burning money, and the technology seemed so far away. Waymo’s robotaxis are now operating in 10 U.S. cities and expanding into new markets. Whether Uber has the staying power to get there is an open question, but it clearly still haunts both men.

For his part, Kalanick never stopped building. This month he unveiled Atoms, the robotics company he’s been developing on the sly since he left 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 his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he is close to acquiring it outright.

Meanwhile, Michael finds a new battlefront. The interview was recorded before the Department of Defense’s negotiations with Anthropic collapsed publicly, and his account of that confrontation is worth a listen. He describes Anthropic as one of a few approved large language model vendors for the department, approved in part through its partnerships with Palantir. As Michael says, the Department of Defense is hardly for everyone. It operates under a dense web of laws, regulations and internal policies that “almost suffocate it,” he told Mirzadekan. He argues that the anthropologist wants to add his own layer on top of all this.

“What I cannot do is have any single company impose its own political preferences above the laws and above my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to illustrate his point. “If you buy Microsoft Office Suite, they won’t tell you what you can type in a Word document, or what email you can send.”

Michael then went further, recalling the same Anthropic discovery he had published last month before his conversation with Mirzadegan. He said Chinese technology companies have been repeatedly hitting Anthropic models with a technique called distillation — essentially reverse engineering the model’s behavior closely enough to replicate its capabilities.

Through China’s civil-military fusion laws, he said, this would give the PLA access to something functionally equivalent to the full, unrestricted anthropic model. Meanwhile, the Department of Defense will work with a version surrounded by Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I’ll be one-armed, tied behind my back facing a fully-functioning human model — by an opponent,” Michael said. “It’s quite Orwellian.”

A bit into the interview, before moving on to the next topic, Michael added: “If you’re an American hero — and I think they are, they’re one of the most important companies in the country — wouldn’t you want to help your war department succeed with the best tools available?”

As industry observers are well aware, the dispute has since moved from the negotiating table to the courtroom.

In late February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed the human a “supply chain risk,” and the government escalated the matter further last week, filing a 40-page brief with the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argued that giving humans access to the Defense Department’s war-fighting infrastructure would introduce “unacceptable risks” into its supply chains in part because the company could theoretically disable or change its technology to suit its interests rather than the country’s interests in wartime.

Anthropic responded on Friday, filing sworn statements, along with a summary, saying the government’s case rests on technical misunderstandings and allegations that were never raised during months of previous negotiations. One such ad, made by Anthropic’s head of public sector, Thiago Ramasamy, directly challenged the government’s claim that Anthropic could interfere in military operations by disrupting or changing how its technology works — something Ramasamy says is not technically possible.

A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.