Behind the Pentagon’s botched AI negotiations, there is a former Uber executive.
The authoritarian strongmen in the government have found the strongmen in tech.
There’s one name that keeps appearing in reports about the closed-door negotiations between the Pentagon, Anthropic, and OpenAI. His name is Emil Michael; he’s an ex-executive at Uber and the current Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering at the Pentagon.
I became familiar with Emil Michael in 2014, when I was a media intern at Uber. I was tasked with assembling a daily media digest for the policy and communications team; a way to measure the positive stories that the team had proactively pitched while also keeping tabs on the negative stories for crisis mitigation. It was, essentially, a means to display the business value of a team that didn’t directly generate revenue.
One morning, there was a particularly heavy news day, with hundreds of articles about the same story spreading like fire. My fellow intern and I had to triage. What happened was Emil Michael–then a business deputy and close friend to the previous CEO Travis Kalanick–had attended an on-record dinner with a number of journalists.
At that dinner, Michael was incensed that a female reporter wrote about the company’s “sexism and misogyny,” following reports of a French escort service. Michael said that he would dig up dirt about the personal life of the female journalist.
The outrage was swift. While Michael later apologized and said that those comments did not reflect his views, he remained at the company as a close friend of Kalanick’s for a few more years.
Michael seems to have flown largely under the radar since his Uber years, until now. A New York Times report describes his central role negotiating contracts under Secretary of War Pete Hegseth:
Minutes before a 5:01 p.m. deadline on Friday, Emil Michael, the Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, was fuming.
For weeks, Mr. Michael, a former top executive at Uber, had been negotiating a $200 million artificial intelligence contract with the A.I. company Anthropic for the Pentagon. The talks had hit obstacles as the agency demanded unfettered use of Anthropic’s A.I. systems, while the company countered that it would not allow its technology to be used for purposes such as the surveillance of Americans.
And:
Mr. Michael, Dr. Amodei and Mr. Altman have known one another for years through business dealings in Silicon Valley, but they have often not gotten along. Dr. Amodei and Mr. Altman, 40, once worked together at OpenAI and are bitter rivals. And as Anthropic’s discussions with the Defense Department dragged on last week, Mr. Michael, 53, publicly accused Dr. Amodei of being “a liar” with “a God-complex.”
Ultimately, Mr. Michael preferred Mr. Altman — who has courted the Trump administration — over Dr. Amodei, the people with knowledge of the negotiations said.
Most of us know what happened since: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared the company Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” for refusing to comply with their desire for unfettered access. Sam Altman and OpenAI swooped in. The public and even OpenAI employees started rebelling, as thousands of ChatGPT users began cancelling their subscriptions (#DeleteGPT). Now, Altman is even backpedaling, labeling the deal as “opportunistic and sloppy.”
The only entity seeming to benefit from this pandemonium and the public’s distaste is Anthropic, which has seen a surge of users defecting from ChatGPT to its competitive product Claude.
The closest parallel I can think of to the #DeleteGPT movement is the #DeleteUber movement from 2017. Users fled Uber because of reports that the company had jacked up its prices during a protest against an executive order banning refugees and immigrants from entering the U.S. While Uber claimed the price hikes were unintentional, the social media ire and broader movement, according to Uber, led to hundreds of thousands of users deleting the app “within days.”
Michael, as far as I’m aware, was not involved with #DeleteUber. And when I worked at Uber, I recall hearing that Michael was an expert “dealmaker,” regardless of the reputational risk brought about by the journalist dinner snafu.
But the messiness of this Pentagon situation calls his “dealmaking” into question. Amodei has won the public relations game. Altman may now be backpedaling. And Michael just said that the Pentagon “can’t be reliant on any one AI provider anymore.”
Perhaps a better word for Michael–one that fits with authoritarian bosses–is “strongman.” It remains to be seen whether and how tech companies, who still have paying users across the ideological spectrum to satisfy, will play ball.
What else we’re reading…
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Nearly 1,000 Google employees are calling for military limits on AI amid Iran strikes and Anthropic fallout.
ICE and CBP have collectively spent at least $515 million on products from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Palantir in the last few years alone.
It’s unclear whether the NSA is excluded from OpenAI’s contract or not.
Ro Khanna’s wealth tax support fuels a primary challenge in Silicon Valley.
Founders Fund Partner and Anduril Co-Founder Trae Stephens is going after WIRED’s reporting of the tech industry.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s statements at a conference: “If Silicon Valley believes we are going to take away everyone’s white collar job...and you’re gonna screw the military—if you don’t think that’s gonna lead to nationalization of our technology, you’re retarded. You might be particularly retarded, because you have a 160 IQ.”