Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, discusses the history of AI lab engagement with the Pentagon following the Biden administration's executive order on AI.
“They were the first to aggressively try to provide service to the government after the Biden administration's executive order about AI because they were, and again, you see this in the marketplace too, OpenAI was more focused on the consumer, with ChatGPT and the subscriptions.”
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More from Emil Michael
Opinion
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Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 33:58The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
Opinion
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Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 36:14The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
Insight
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“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions,
Look at the terms of service.
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This technology is like nothin…”
Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 40:51The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
PredictionOpen · timeframe Apr 2029
Michael: Anthropic's First Amendment retaliation claim against Pentagon will fail
“I think the notion that a First Amendment claim is going to hold up is, is, would be shocking, because that means that the government has no choice to make.”
Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 47:52The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
Insight
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“You could do much more, be more precise, be more specific about what you're going after, what you're defending how you know, and the precision is really what's interesting to me because if you can use AI to detect and discriminate and, by discriminate, I mean,…”
Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 1:47The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Michael: AI targeting tools keep identical rules of engagement and approvals
“It's, you have the same rules of engagement, the same approval system. What you now have is better aggregation and synthesis of the data that you would already use to make that decision.”
Emil MichaelApr 15, 2026▶ 12:38The Pentagon's AI Plan + Behind the Anthropic Fight — With Under Secretary of War Emil Michael
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