Emil Michael, who is now the top Pentagon official, says he will never forgive the Uber investors who fired him and Kalanick.

Emil Michael, who serves as the chief technology officer at the Department of Defense, is back in the open about the government’s ongoing battle with Anthropic, and a newly released podcast interview offers the most detailed look yet at his thoughts on that conflict — as well as settling old scores from his Uber days.

The interview, released Monday and conducted last month by Joubin Mirzadegan, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who leads the firm’s portfolio team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history — and was recorded before the DoD’s dispute with Anthropic reached its full potential. But it’s Michael’s words about his departure from Uber — and his not-so-disguised anger about it — that grabbed our attention first.

When Mirzadegan casually asked him if he had been shown the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael responded with one word: “Successfully.”

Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick did, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation stemming from allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in the allegations, but the investigation – led by former US Attorney General Eric Holder – concluded that he should be removed. Kalanick followed, pushing 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 if he was still “salty” about it, Michael did not answer. “I will never forget that, even if I forgive you,” he said.

The firing affects 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 out killed it.

During the interview, Michael argued that the decision was driven by a desire to protect immediate benefits rather than building something lasting.

“They wanted to preserve their concentrated profits, rather than trying to make this a multi-billion dollar company,” he said.

Kalanick was equally identified. At the Abundance Summit in Los Angeles last year, he said this was Waymo’s second time when it was canceled and he was filling a gap. “You can say, ‘I wish we had a standalone car-sharing product right now. That would be great,'” he told the audience.

Uber sold its self-driving unit to Aurora in what was widely regarded as a fire sale in 2020, three years after both were gone. The decision seemed secure at the time; automated driving was burning money, and the technology felt too far away. Waymo’s robots now operate in 10 US cities and are expanding 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.

On the other hand, Kalanick never really stopped building. This month he launched Atoms, the robotics company he has been developing in secret since leaving Uber eight years ago. He also revealed that he is a major investor in Pronto, a private vehicle startup focused on industry and mining founded by his former colleague at Uber, Anthony Levandowski, and said he is going to buy it outright.

Meanwhile, Michael has found a new battlefield. The interview was recorded shortly before the DoD’s negotiations with Anthropic went public, and his account of the disagreement is worth listening to. He describes Anthropic as one of the department’s few major authorized language vendors, enabled in part by its partnership with Palantir. As Michael puts it, the DoD is not a free-for-all. It operates under such an array of laws, regulations, and internal policies that “we’re almost suffocating,” he told Mirzadegan. Anthropic, he says, wants to add its own layer on top of all that.

“What I can’t do is have one company that enforces its policy preferences over the rules and over my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to make his point. “When you buy Microsoft Office Suite, it doesn’t tell you what to write in a Word document, or what email to send.”

Michael then went further, requesting that Anthropic itself had published the previous month prior to his interview with Mirzadegan. Chinese tech companies, he said, have been hitting Anthropic models over and over again in a process called distillation — essentially distilling the model’s behavior down close enough to replicate its capabilities.

Using China’s military mobilization rules, he said, would give the People’s Liberation Army access to something equivalent to the full, unrestricted Anthropic model. Meanwhile, the DoD will be working on a version of the Anthropic guidelines. “I would be armed with one, strapped to the back against a fully capable Anthropic model – the enemy,” Michael said. “It’s completely Orwellian.”

Michael added later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic: “If you’re America’s champion – and I believe they are, they’re one of the most important companies in the country – don’t you want to help your Department of Defense succeed with the best tools available?”

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

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a “procurement risk” in late February, and the government expanded again last week, filing a 40-page brief in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argued that giving Anthropic access to the DoD’s warfighting infrastructure would present an “unacceptable risk” to its supply chains in part because the company could disable or modify its technology to suit its interests rather than the nation’s during a war.

Anthropic was dismissed on Friday, filing affidavits, in a brief aside, saying the government’s case rested on technical misunderstandings and claims that had not been raised in months of negotiations. One of those declarations, filed by Anthropic’s head of public affairs Thiyagu Ramasamy, directly contradicted the government’s claim that Anthropic could disrupt military operations by disabling or altering the way its technology behaves — something Ramsamy said was technically impossible.

A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.