There you have it. Emil Michael — Trump's Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering …
April 1, 2026 · 0 likes · 0 comments
China Threat Defense
There you have it. Emil Michael — Trump's Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Pentagon's CTO — holds a multimillion-dollar stake in Perplexity AI. A direct Anthropic competitor.
And he was the central figure in the decision to blacklist Anthropic from DoW contracts — after Anthropic refused to let its AI be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Let that sink in.
The Pentagon official responsible for AI procurement had millions invested in a company that directly benefits from Anthropic losing those contracts. That's not a conflict of interest allegation. That's a fact. Confirmed by his own public financial disclosures on ProPublica.
The result? The Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" — the first time in American history any company has received that designation. OpenAI swooped in and got the contract Anthropic lost. Sam Altman's Slack messages to staff suggested it might be "a good time to work out a deal" with Emil Michael.
A federal judge blocked the supply chain risk designation on March 26th. Because — surprise — there was no actual risk. There never was. This was ego and incompetence in service of financial interest.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Emil Michael does not belong in this role. He's the former SVP of Uber. He has no technical depth, no credibility in AI, and now a documented conflict of interest at the highest level of US defense technology policy.
The United States is burning its most important AI relationships while China moves in lockstep.
Time for Emil to go. For real this time.
And he was the central figure in the decision to blacklist Anthropic from DoW contracts — after Anthropic refused to let its AI be used for mass surveillance and autonomous weapons.
Let that sink in.
The Pentagon official responsible for AI procurement had millions invested in a company that directly benefits from Anthropic losing those contracts. That's not a conflict of interest allegation. That's a fact. Confirmed by his own public financial disclosures on ProPublica.
The result? The Pentagon formally designated Anthropic a "supply chain risk" — the first time in American history any company has received that designation. OpenAI swooped in and got the contract Anthropic lost. Sam Altman's Slack messages to staff suggested it might be "a good time to work out a deal" with Emil Michael.
A federal judge blocked the supply chain risk designation on March 26th. Because — surprise — there was no actual risk. There never was. This was ego and incompetence in service of financial interest.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Emil Michael does not belong in this role. He's the former SVP of Uber. He has no technical depth, no credibility in AI, and now a documented conflict of interest at the highest level of US defense technology policy.
The United States is burning its most important AI relationships while China moves in lockstep.
Time for Emil to go. For real this time.