Tech
Emil Michael, now a senior Pentagon official, says he’ll never forgive Uber investors who ousted him and Kalanick
Emil Michael, who serves as a senior technology official at the Department of Defense, 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 into his thinking on that dispute — as well as an unguarded settling of 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 venture firm’s portfolio operating team, covered a range of topics including policy and personal history — and was recorded before the DoD’s feud with Anthropic had fully come to a head. But it is Michael’s remarks about his departure from Uber — and his barely concealed bitterness about it — that grabbed our attention first.
When Mirzadegan asked him point-blank whether he had been shown the door alongside Travis Kalanick, Michael answered with a single word: “Effectively.”
Michael resigned eight days before Kalanick did in June of 2017, as part of the fallout from a workplace investigation triggered by allegations of sexual harassment and gender discrimination at the company. He was not named in those allegations, but the inquiry — led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder — concluded he should be removed. Kalanick followed, pushed out 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 whether he was still “salty” about it, Michael didn’t equivocate. “I’ll never forget that, nor forgive,” he said.
The ouster grates on 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 Uber’s future, and that the investors who forced them out killed it.
During the interview, Michael argued the decision was driven by a desire to protect near-term returns rather than build something lasting.
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“They wanted to preserve their embedded gains, rather than try to make this a trillion-dollar company,” he said.
Kalanick has been equally pointed. 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, ‘Wish we had an autonomous 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 perceived as a fire sale in 2020, three years after both men were gone. The decision looked defensible at the time; autonomous driving was burning cash, and the tech felt very distant. Now Waymo’s robotaxis are operating in 10 U.S. cities and 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.
For his part, Kalanick never really stopped building. This month he took the wraps off Atoms, a robotics company he has been developing in stealth since around the time he left Uber eight years ago. He also revealed he is the largest investor in Pronto, an autonomous vehicle startup focused on industrial and mining sites founded by his former Uber colleague Anthony Levandowski, and said he is on the verge of acquiring it outright.
Meanwhile, Michael has found a new battlefront. The interview was recorded just before the DoD’s negotiations with Anthropic publicly collapsed, and his account of that standoff is worth a listen. He describes Anthropic as one of only a handful of approved large language model vendors for the department, approved in part through its partnerships with Palantir. As Michael frames it, the DoD is hardly a free-for-all. It operates under such a dense web of laws, regulations, and internal policies that “we almost choke on them,” he tells Mirzadegan. Anthropic, he argues, wants to add its own layer on top of all of that.
“What I can’t do is have any one company impose their own policy preferences on top of the laws and on top of my internal policies,” he said, using an analogy to make his point. “If you buy the Microsoft Office Suite, they don’t tell you what you could write in a Word document, or what email you can send.”
Michael then went further, invoking a finding Anthropic itself had published last month ahead of his conversation with Mirzadegan. Chinese technology companies, he argued, had been hitting Anthropic’s models repeatedly in 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, that would give the People’s Liberation Army access to something functionally equivalent to Anthropic’s full, unrestricted model. Meanwhile, the DoD would be working with a version hemmed in by Anthropic’s own guidelines. “I’d be one-armed, tied behind my back against an Anthropic model that’s fully capable — by an adversary,” Michael said. “It’s totally Orwellian.”
Michael added a bit later in the interview, before moving on to the next topic: “If you’re an American 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 War succeed with the best tools available?”
As industry watchers are well aware, the dispute has since moved from negotiating table to courtroom.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth deemed Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” in late February, and the government escalated further last week, filing a 40-page brief in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The brief argued that giving Anthropic access to the DoD’s war-fighting infrastructure would introduce “unacceptable risk” into its supply chains in part because the company could theoretically disable or alter its own technology to suit its interests rather than the country’s in a time of war.
Anthropic fired back on Friday, submitting sworn declarations, alongside a brief, arguing the government’s case rests on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never raised during months of prior negotiations. One of those declarations, filed by Anthropic’s head of public sector Thiyagu Ramasamy, directly challenged the government’s claim that Anthropic could interfere with military operations by disabling or altering how its technology behaves — something Ramasamy says is not technically possible.
A hearing is scheduled for Tuesday in San Francisco.
Tech
Anthropic releases Opus 4.8 with new ‘dynamic workflow’ tool
On Thursday, Anthropic released Opus 4.8, the newest version of its most advanced publicly available model. The model is available everywhere, with standard pricing at the same level as the previous Opus release.
The new model comes just 41 days after Opus 4.7 was released, a much faster upgrade cycle than normal for Anthropic. (The most recent Sonnet and Haiku models are three and seven months old, respectively.) The fast turnaround may have something to do with the chilly reception to Opus 4.7, which some users found disappointing.
That interval has also seen significant new releases for OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Gemini Flash model, increasing the pressure on Anthropic to keep pace.
Opus 4.8 comes with the expected best-in-class benchmark results, but there’s also particular attention to how the model manages bad or uncertain data. In the launch post, Anthropic’s early testers found that the new model is “more likely to flag uncertainties about its work and less likely to make unsupported claims.”
Echoing this point, a testimonial from Bridgewater associates said the biggest difference in the upgrade was “Opus 4.8’s tendency to proactively flag issues with the inputs and outputs of an analysis, something other models routinely missed and left to the users to catch.”
Together with the new model, Anthropic launched a feature called Dynamic Workflows, which will be available in research preview. The system is designed to help larger models like Opus manage complex tasks across hundreds of parallel subagents.
“Claude Code alongside Opus 4.8 can now carry out codebase-scale migrations across hundreds of thousands of lines of code from kickoff to merge, with the existing test suite as its bar,” the post explains.
Anthropic is still holding back its most advanced Mythos model after a tentative preview last month raised cybersecurity concerns. However, the company hinted in today’s Opus release that the Mythos preview period might soon end, once necessary safeguards are complete.
“We’re making swift progress on developing these safeguards and expect to be able to bring Mythos-class models to all our customers in the coming weeks,” the company wrote.
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Tech
Corgi announces $106M raise at $2.6B valuation — double what it was worth 3 weeks ago
Insurance tech Corgi on Thursday announced a $106 million Series B1 raise, valuing the company at $2.6 billion, just three weeks after announcing a $160 million Series B at a $1.3 billion valuation and four months after its $108 million Series A. The company offers insurance, working specifically with startups in areas like tech, cyber, and general liability; it counts Deel and Artisan among its customers.
Even in the current go-go dealmaking environment, that sequencing is remarkable. While startups raising back-to-back rounds at steep step-ups have become almost routine, a company whose valuation doubles in three weeks is unusual enough to raise questions, particularly given the investor set in both rounds is the same.
Asked what material event justified that kind of jump in such a short window, investor Kanyi Maqubela of Kindred Ventures cited the company’s momentum. It’s an explanation may satisfy some, but the practice more generally is starting to attract scrutiny in LP circles. “There’s growing distrust of internal markups,” said one LP who backs numerous venture funds and asked not to be named. Said this person of exit mechanisms specifically, “[I]f a company [is] just getting re-priced upward with no real liquidity event, LPs notice.”
The specific concern is that a fund that invests at one valuation, then marks it up three weeks later can make portfolio performance look stronger on paper than the underlying business may justify.
In this case, Maqubela suggested, that’s not an issue for Kindred’s limited partners, nor for Corgi’s other investors, which include Prime Capital, Leblon Capital, Alumni Ventures, and Y Combinator.
“LPs really like exits above all,” Maqubela said in a message to TechCrunch. “They discount the value of markups since those aren’t always reflective of reality.” He added that in this case, revenue growth rationalized the new round.
Founded in 2024 by Emily Yuan and Nico Laqua, Corgi says it’s building coverage for what it calls “newer categories” of risk while also addressing an often underserved market among legacy insurance carriers — startups and the unique liability problems they face, including those related to AI.
“Corgi covers anything from when an AI system causes financial loss, misinformation, operational failures, or compliance issues,” Laqua told TechCrunch. “Many legacy policies either exclude these risks or handle them ambiguously.
Corgi is not alone in the insurtech market; Vouch, which is backed by Y Combinator, operates in a similar space.
When asked about the back-to-back rounds, Laqua said that insurance is a “highly capital-intensive industry,” and that “demand has accelerated quickly across new product lines and partnerships.” Building an AI-native platform compounds those costs further.
“We’re best known for our business insurance products, but the additional capital will be used to expand into new insurance categories, scale the AI underwriting platform, grow embedded distribution partnerships, and continue growing our team,” Laqua said.
Corgi has now raised $378 million in total funding from its investors.
Correction: The title of this headline originally misstated the valuation due to an editing error.
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Tech
Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline extended to June 8 after overwhelming demand
Founders, the battlefield is still open, but not for much longer.
After overwhelming demand from founders around the world, TechCrunch has extended the Startup Battlefield 200 application deadline to June 8. If you thought you missed your opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage in October at San Francisco’s Moscone West, this is your final chance to step into one of tech’s most competitive startup arenas.
Nominate a standout startup or submit your application before the deadline.
What is Startup Battlefield 200?
Startup Battlefield 200 is where ambitious early-stage startups go from unknown to impossible to ignore. Selected founders will take the spotlight at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026, pitching live in front of elite investors, influential media, and the global startup ecosystem. One startup will walk away with $100,000 in equity-free funding, but every company selected gains visibility that can reshape its trajectory.
More than 1,700 startups have participated in Startup Battlefield over the years. Together, they’ve raised more than $32 billion and produced over 250 exits, including acquisitions by companies like Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Uber, and Amazon.
This is the same competition that helped launch companies like Dropbox, Discord, Mint, Fitbit, and Trello. More than 1,500 startups have competed in Startup Battlefield, and many have gone on to become category-defining businesses.
Why founders are still racing to apply
Competition for Startup Battlefield 200 has intensified as founders look for ways to stand out in a crowded fundraising environment. The extension gives more startups the opportunity to enter, but expectations are higher than ever.
Selected startups receive:
- A free exhibit table for all three days of Disrupt.
- Four complimentary Disrupt passes.
- Branding and visibility inside the Disrupt event app.
- Press exposure and lead-generation opportunities.
- Access to founder-only masterclasses.
- The opportunity to pitch live on the Disrupt Stage.
- Direct feedback from leading venture capitalists.
- A chance to win $100,000 in equity-free funding.
Who should apply
TechCrunch is looking for bold early-stage startups with a working MVP and a vision capable of disrupting an industry. Bootstrapped, pre-seed, and seed-stage startups are encouraged to apply. Select Series A startups in capital-intensive sectors may also qualify.
If you are building something category-changing, this is your chance to prove it on one of the biggest stages in tech.
The clock is still ticking
The deadline extension was driven by overwhelming demand, but the battlefield will not stay open forever. Thousands of startups are competing for a limited number of spots, and every application is reviewed closely by the TechCrunch team.
This is your opportunity to get in front of investors, customers, media, and future partners all in one place. Nominate or apply before June 8 and fight for your place among the next generation of breakout startups.
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