AI Policy Clash: Anthropic and the U.S. Government | DoW Emil Michael

I haven't seen a technology that has the potential to disrupt so many other industries in my lifetime.

Imagine that some Chinese tech companies are stealing Anthropic tech effectively by doing distillation. Then the Chinese government can use the effective capabilities of the Anthropic model against the United States, but I would be using a lesser version of Anthropic bound by their policies. So I'd be one arm tied behind my back against an Anthropic model that's fully capable by an adversary. Sorry.

No, that's usually, you know, those seats are prized, right? Because the president calls out his invited guests, and Congress takes up the gallery, the audience. So, I'm not planning to go.

You just ask. You just ask. I wish. Maybe we'll see them around tonight.

I know. Hopefully they're not stuck on their social media looking at all the haters, and just celebrating.

Much less than I used to. Ironically enough, I would say that, being at Uber during the 2016-17 timeframe when all these sort of social happenings were going down and there was sort of—kind of like now there's a little bit of a moment of backlash against AI companies. Back then there was a backlash against some of these mobile app companies, whether it was Airbnb or Uber.

And the press was super negative, but I remember also then the press was less fractured. So there was just like a lot of negativity. Now there's good and bad. You know, there's different elements of the press that support what the administration's doing, some that don't. So you kind of get more of a balance, as odd as that sounds.

I mean, we were 100 people.

Yeah, and left when we were about 20,000.

I mean, we were probably in 500 or 600 cities by the time I left, and we were only in one or two when I had started.

Yeah, we were the good guys in 2012, '13, '14, '15. Bad guys in '16, the worst. There was an article I always remember—my wife reminds me of it—which was like "Emil Michael and Travis Kalanick are literally the worst." It was like Puck News or something like that, some rag. And that was sort of the bottom, was '17.

There was a couple of factors. I would say that there was some of that underdog to Goliath, which you see some of the AI companies sort of experiencing now, which then everyone sort of—you know, everyone always likes the revolutionary, not the incumbent, so to speak. So you become the incumbent, there's some natural sort of antibodies that develop. But also 2017, being in San Francisco when President Trump was elected, was like a moment for that city where it was like convulsing, you know, in just about politically odd way. And I'll never forgot, we were invited to a business council, like Uber execs, Travis and I. And you know, Tim Cook was there. This was like a broad, you know, "who are the important companies," and we got invited.

And some set of employees kind of went nuts. They started chaining themselves to our front doors, internal protests, right? Internal. And then that led to a—I don't know if you remember this Delete Uber campaign, because there was some miscommunication. Remember surge pricing from Uber? People hated it. If it's raining, the cost goes up.

But people still don't like it. And there was some protest about asylum seekers or something in the first months of the presidency, and we said, "Okay, we're going to stay out of this. We're going to eliminate—we're not going to have surge pricing to JFK during this protest because the protest was happening there." And people thought—some taxi driver thought we were trying to bust the taxi union, and it spun out of control. And half a million people deleted the Uber app that day.

Yeah. Because, you know, it was very easy to delete the Uber app, take a screenshot, post it on your social, you're a cool protester, you know, Uber's bad. And so, not to go too deep on that, but that was one other factor, was just like the sensibilities of Silicon Valley given what a mono-political culture it was, were offended. And then, you know, we were in a #MeToo era, we were in lots of different factors, and we had a really poor investor base.

Effectively.

Oh, yeah. I'll never forget that, nor forgive.

Yeah, I'm still a shareholder. I mean, the thing about—I still love Uber as a product, as a business.

No, I'm proud of the company. It's a global brand. It solves a huge need. It's a super profitable company. We should talk about the number of babies that were born in Ubers because people were like, "I'll take an Uber to the hospital versus an ambulance," and how many drunk driving deaths were avoided because people used Uber and they started to rely on it as a utility for their social life, and how it made outer cities accessible and increased commerce and safety. So there's a lot of good externalities from Uber.

And the business model always works. That's why I held the stock, right, and still do, and still root for the company. And I've gotten to know Dara, and I think he's a good leader.

Yeah, saw that. Saw that.

Yeah, I guess that seems like what the theory is that I've read.

Yeah, we bought this Carnegie Mellon robotics company, and we were investing very early before Tesla had FSD or anything like that. Waymo had still been around, but they weren't as big as we could have been. And that was one of the things, is the investors didn't like that we were—this one investor didn't like that we were betting on the future so far ahead. And what entrepreneurs do, they like look around corners. They're like, "Hey, this may take a while, but I have to start doing this because you can see the potential disruption if autonomous vehicles become really prominent." So we were investing in that, and it was a long-term project. Cost a lot of money, but they wanted to preserve their embedded gains rather than try to make this a trillion-dollar company. And that was sort of another source of conflict.

Yeah, Secretary Hegseth.

I care about a few things. I'll say that one of the things that I've been spending the most time of late on is trying to infuse AI into the Department of War. The Department of War is 3 million people. It's literally the biggest organization in the world. And therefore it has all the opportunities and challenges you find with how do you make a 3 million-person organization that has technology that's 20 years old from a sort of productivity standpoint, how do you make it more efficient? And actually people are happier if you could take the mundane tasks off their hands. So there's the enterprise level of how you can use AI here, just like any big organization would. And then we do a lot of intelligence gathering, and a lot of that's done manually. So how do you use AI to sort of synthesize lots of data and give humans more capability to analyze more? And then for war fighting, if there's a conflict, how do you take these—use AI tools to make conflict more winnable by us, ensuring that we have the right assets in the right place at the right time, that we're seeing the right things, and so on. So that's number one. It's like getting AI into the department and usable across all these echelons and doing it in a smart way.

The second thing is new entrants: all these companies in El Segundo, all these defense tech companies, and all the money that's going into them. I want to help them succeed for a couple reasons. Number one, they have good product. They're starting with a clean sheet of paper and they're saying, "I'm inventing a new product that's not from the Cold War era that'll be cheaper, more manufacturable, and has sort of the latest, greatest scientific and engineering and thinking on it." And then there's a lot of capital that's crowded in around those companies. So helping them succeed in this big bureaucracy that we're in is something I do every day because if they succeed, that more money goes into that sector, which means less spending in R&D by the department, more success by entrepreneurs, more people joining those companies. So it's a virtuous circle. So I spend a lot of time trying to get these new companies in.

And then third, I try to solve critical national problems like critical minerals, right? We have a critical minerals problem. We have an industrial base problem where we've outsourced so much for so long—batteries, several categories. How do we re-domesticate them so we're never dependent on an adversary for something we really, really, really need? And that's sort of the broader administration strategy, but I'm doing the defense part of that.

Not chief procurement officer—chief venture capitalist. I'm trying to bet on the companies and the people who could build new capabilities.

Something like that. And then we have the Office of Strategic Capital here, which is where we have a bunch of money to go put in critical minerals companies to encourage them to do things in the US, and battery companies and so on. And that's like a little bit more of a pure investment philosophy: is this company going to produce a set of products that we need to have domestically, and can I back them with a low-cost loan and have venture capital crowd around that because it's otherwise unsexy.