Google stacks its legal team with former DOJ employees as it faces antitrust cases
People walk near the Google offices on July 04, 2022 in New York City.
John Smith | View Press | Getty Images
Google‘s parent company Alphabet has stacked its legal team with former Department of Justice employees as it fights two separate antitrust lawsuits from the agency, public profiles show.
Former DOJ employees make up both its in-house team and members of outside counsel firms it employs. The company has hired three former DOJ officials into regulatory roles since May 2022, and one before that in 2021, according to public information including social media profiles. Google also uses four different outside counsel firms loaded with nearly 20 former DOJ officials, many of whom worked in the Antitrust Division at various times.
Such hiring to its internal regulatory team is a reflection of the intense scrutiny Google is facing from governments around the world. It can be a signal that a company anticipates dealing with regulatory challenges in years to come, even if it doesn’t know exactly what form it’ll take yet, according to two former government officials.
“When companies find themselves under intense scrutiny from regulatory authorities, antitrust law or otherwise, they make moves like this,” said Bill Kovacic, a former Federal Trade Commission chair who now teaches antitrust law at George Washington University.
Google now faces two antitrust challenges from the DOJ, both to its search and ad tech businesses, and additional challenges from a slew of state attorneys general. Regulators around the world, including in Europe and Australia, have also presented policy and enforcement hurdles.
Google’s hiring is not surprising for a company under such a microscope, according to Doug Melamed, a former acting assistant attorney general at the DOJ Antitrust Division who’s now a scholar-in-residence at Stanford Law School.
The company had already been fighting one complex antitrust case that would likely require a team of 10 to 15 lawyers alone, according to Melamed, when the Department brought its second antitrust challenge against the company earlier this year.
“They don’t have the capacity to handle a case like that just sitting idle,” Melamed said. “They’ve got to now think about well, what outside lawyers are available that have to have the time and expertise to handle this case? And then, do I have the in-house capability to support it and supervise it?”
The added threat of new legislation targeting Google’s business, and that of other tech firms, looms. In the near term, it appears that a massive lobbying campaign by the industry has successfully delayed the most disruptive reforms. But the possibility of renewed energy around that legislation still hangs over the industry, and a company like Google “can take nothing for granted now,” Kovacic said, adding that’s likely a reason for the company to build out its regulatory forces.
“New entrants and new innovations are driving competition and delivering value for America’s consumers, publishers, and merchants,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement for this story. “We’re proud of our services and we look forward to making our case in court.”
Revolving door hiring
Alphabet now has at least five former DOJ staffers on its legal team, including Google’s director of competition Kevin Yingling, who’s been with the company for more than a decade and worked as a trial attorney at the Department of Justice from 2000 to 2005, according to his LinkedIn.
The company hired Kate Smith as counsel for Alphabet’s regulatory response, investigations and strategy unit in February 2021, according to LinkedIn. Smith was a trial attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Frauds division from September 2015 until January 2021.
In May 2022, according to LinkedIn, Alphabet hired Mike Kass, a former trial attorney in the DOJ’s Civil Fraud section, as its regulatory and litigation counsel for products.
A month later, the company hired Seema Mittal Roper as counsel on its regulatory response team. Mittal Roper worked as an assistant U.S. attorney for the DOJ in Maryland from 2013 to 2018, according to LinkedIn.
Most recently, the company hired Jack Mellyn as strategy counsel on its regulatory team. Mellyn was previously an attorney advisor and then acting assistant chief in the DOJ’s competition policy and advocacy section, according to a previously available social media profile.
It’s not clear which employees are working on the specific matters before the DOJ and Kass’ role appears focused outside of antitrust. It’s likely these employees never worked on Google-related matters they’re dealing with now during their time in government, given their dates and areas of previous employment, as well as federal ethics rules that bar certain conflicts.
But experts say this kind of hiring, which is common among businesses faced with regulatory scrutiny, can still be beneficial to a company because of the unique insight, touch or credibility that an ex-government attorney might hold when it comes to their former colleagues.
“There are lots of lawyers out there. But only alumni of an office really understand how that office works,” said Jeff Hauser, executive director of the Revolving Door Project, which tracks the business ties of executive branch officials. “That means its strengths and weaknesses, that means the tendencies of people in that office. And they can therefore give much more concrete intelligence and better-informed advice to their client.”
Hauser said this may mean the lawyers could advise a client or employer to flood the agency with information rather than comply with a certain document request, knowing that the enforcers don’t have the capacity to deal with it. Or, they might suggest strategies to approach a deposition, knowing the government staffer conducting it.
“A lawyer who’s had experience in the government doesn’t bring information about the specific matters of the companies involved, but rather brings a general perspective about how the agency is approaching these kinds of problems,” Melamed said.
Enforcement agencies also often have to trust whether they believe the target of an investigation has complied with its requests. Hauser said the agencies may be more inclined to take the word of their former colleagues, compared to a more removed attorney.
A recent event shows what can happen when that trust is broken. The DOJ last month accused Google of destroying chat messages it should have kept under a litigation hold related to the investigation. The DOJ made the accusation in a legal filing after Epic Games raised the concern in its own antitrust litigation against Google.
A Google spokesperson said in a statement at the time of the DOJ’s filing that they “strongly refute the DOJ’s claims.”
Google also works with outside counsel firms on its antitrust cases, including Axinn, Freshfields, Ropes & Gray and Wilson Sonsini, based on reports, statements and legal filings. Those firms collectively have around 20 former DOJ employees on their staff, many of them working in antitrust. Though these attorneys may not all work on Google matters, the firms themselves often tout the benefit of former government officials in bringing a helpful perspective to clients.
For example, Freshfields says on its website that its “deep bench of former DOJ and FTC trial attorneys gives us unique insight into how the enforcement agencies approach enforcement in general and litigation in particular.”
Kovacic said agency experience is something companies look for in hiring outside firms.
“In deciding who to retain, what law firm to retain or what economic consultancy to retain, they would place a lot of weight on how many former government officials are in those firms,” Kovacic said.
Freshfields attorneys Julie Elmer and Eric Mahr have led Google’s defense against an advertising technology monopolization case brought by a group of states led by Texas, The New York Times reported in 2021. And Bloomberg Law reported this year that Mahr will also lead its defense in the ad tech case brought by the DOJ.
Mahr was director of litigation for the DOJ Antitrust Division from 2015 to 2017, according to the Freshfields site, and Elmer worked as a trial attorney in the Antitrust Division from 2015 to 2020, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Revolving door hiring goes both ways between the public and private sectors, with government officials often working for previous employers or clients who become relevant in their work. For example, DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter previously worked for clients including Microsoft and Yelp which have complained of Google’s allegedly anticompetitive behavior.
Ultimately, however, Kanter was cleared to work on cases and investigations involving Google, despite the company’s suggestion that his past work should cast doubt on his ability to be fair in such matters.
The DOJ and Wilson Sonsini declined to comment. The three other firms mentioned did not immediately provide a comment for this story.
Limits for former government employees
There are limits on what former government officials can work on under federal ethics and Bar rules.
For example, the DOJ’s website says that former employees can’t represent someone before the government on an issue involving parties they “personally and substantially” worked on during their time in government. For two years after leaving the Department, a former employee also cannot represent anyone before the government in a matter involving parties they know “was pending under his official responsibility for the last year of government service and in which the U.S. is a party or has a substantial interest.”
And for one year after leaving the agency, former senior employees cannot represent someone before the agency “with the intent to influence” the DOJ on a pending matter or one in which it has an interest.
Personal and substantial work on a matter within government doesn’t depend on the length of time devoted to it, but the role a person played in potentially influencing the outcome or direction, according to Virginia Canter, the chief ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) who previously advised government officials on ethics at agencies including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department.
But even if a former government official can’t work on a specific matter they were privy to during their earlier employment, their insight might still be useful to a company.
“You can read about it, but when you’re actually part of dealing with these cases, you know that there are certain factors that are going to either act as mitigating or … that are going to more favorably incline you to bring a case,” Canter said. “It’s just your general knowledge and experience.”
When companies hire former government officials, they may also have the idea that those employees will be viewed more favorably by the current regime.
“Maybe there’s just this general impression that they’re trying to surround themselves with what will be perceived by their former colleagues as the good guys,” Canter hypothesized.
Some might argue that experience could be beneficial to the government in some cases, Canter noted. A former government employee might have a deeper understanding of the importance of compliance or providing certain information to officials, for example, having seen up close what could be at stake if they don’t.
Hauser said it’s unlikely DOJ leadership, especially Kanter, who has made a point to bring more aggressive cases in the tech space and overall, would be overly swayed to view things Google’s way in ongoing matters. But, he said, the impact of former DOJ staff employed by Google could be more influential in an emerging issue, where there’s an opportunity to leave a first impression on senior leadership about it.
The degree of this kind of influence may be relatively small on the level of an individual case, Hauser said, but for a company under such a high degree of regulatory scrutiny, it could add up.
“You’re talking about billions and billions of dollars of potential implications for Google’s net worth,” Hauser said. “Relatively small changes in the scope of the investigation, the timeframe of the investigation, can be very big, even if they don’t go to the overall question of will there be any lawsuits by the Justice Department against Google.”
WATCH: How US antitrust law works, and what it means for Big Tech
President Donald Trump holds a news conference with Elon Musk to mark the end of the Tesla CEO’s tenure as a special government employee overseeing the U.S. DOGE Service on Friday May 30, 2025 in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington.
Tom Brenner | The Washington Post | Getty Images
General Motors’ announcement on Tuesday that its upcoming quarterly results will include a $1.6 billion charge from its electric vehicle investments is the latest in a string of troubling EV-related disclosures from big automakers.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said late last month that he expects demand for fully electric vehicles to be slashed in half following the end of a federal tax credit program. His prediction came after Stellantis, the parent company of auto brands including Chrysler and Jeep, said it was scrapping its target of producing nothing but electric vehicles in Europe by 2030, and backed off ambitious targets for the U.S., notably for Chrysler.
The industry, which was already facing hurdles imposed by the Trump administration, faces a hefty dose of uncertainty now that consumers can no longer take advantage of $7,500 tax credits for purchasing EVs. The incentives expired at the end of September as part of President Trump’s signature spending bill.
As automakers reset investor expectations, one name has been notably absent from the conversation: Tesla.
Elon Musk’s company is by far the largest seller of EVs in the U.S., though its market share has been sliding as competition has increased and its brand value has declined. Tesla’s share of the all-electric market in the U.S. was estimated at 43.1% at the end of September, down from 49% at the end of last year, according to data provided to CNBC from Motor Intelligence
Tesla is slated to report third-quarter results next week, and Wall Street will be eager to hear what kind of demand the company expects with the credits no longer available. Tesla recently unveiled stripped-down, lower-cost variants of its popular Model Y SUV and Model 3 sedans, offsetting some of the effective price increases that come with the loss of incentives.
Steve Greenfield, general partner at investment firm Automotive Ventures, said the retreat of legacy automakers from the segment could be good news for Tesla as its market share may start to rebound. He said in an email that the company has “very strong brand loyalty.”
“Chances are, most Tesla buyers will continue to stay in the brand, as they buy their next new car,” Greenfield said.
However, significant challenges loom. Interest in battery electric vehicles “is very likely to shrink dramatically” in the fourth quarter, he said, due to the “pull-ahead of demand,” as consumers rushed to buy EVs before the credit expired. As the year ends, Tesla will likely face a “double whammy,” Greenfield said, from reduced BEV sales and lower margins on the cars they do sell.
Tesla didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Investors have become more bullish. Following a 36% slump in the first quarter, the stock has rallied and is now up more than 7% for the year, aided by Musk’s purchase of about $1 billion worth of Tesla stock in September.
The brutal start to the year was linked to a consumer backlash in the U.S. and Europe in response to Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric, his work for President Trump slashing the federal workforce, and his endorsements of far-right groups including Germany’s AfD party.
Sharing in the pain
In the company’s third-quarter earnings scheduled for next Wednesday, analysts are expecting to see revenue growth of 3.5% from a year earlier to $26.1 billion, according to LSEG. Analysts are projecting a revenue drop in the fourth quarter and a 3.5% slide for all of 2025, which would mark the first full-year decline on record.
Earlier this month, Tesla reported a 7% year-over-year increase in quarterly vehicle deliveries for the third quarter. That marked a turnaround after two consecutive quarterly declines to start the year.
“It’s not just a retreat of everybody else, and Tesla gets to run away with the market,” said Mark Wakefield, global automotive market lead at Alix Partners, in an interview.
Even before the Republican spending bill in July, consumer demand for fully electric vehicles had “already kind of flatlined a bit,” said Wakefield. Car buyers have been looking for a “breakthrough moment” where EVs would become cost competitive with hybrid or gas-powered models.
Wakefield added that “this market needs a sense of newness,” and that the new, lower-priced Model Y and Model 3 options are not exactly “earth shattering.”
The Trump administration isn’t making life easy.
Robbie Orvis, a senior director at Energy Innovation, a nonpartisan climate policy think tank, told CNBC the automakers’ writedowns were expected and stem entirely from policy changes beyond just the tax credits.
The Trump White House has also “revoked California’s waiver to set its own vehicle standards, revoked billions in funding for EV chargers and for auto plants to retool to build EVs, and is in the process of undoing vehicle tailpipe standards that would encourage the adoption of EVs,” Orvis said.
Those policies, along with tariffs, have already caused billions of dollars in losses for U.S. automakers, which means they aren’t in a position to invest in new market segments, Orvis said.
Tesla is experiencing its share of that pain, and it’s showing up most acutely in international markets.
“Chinese automakers are rapidly displacing U.S. automakers in foreign markets as they are able to offer cheaper, higher-quality new cars, particularly EVs, in markets where there is large and growing demand for these cars,” Orvis said.
The Tesla Bot humanoid robot of Tesla ”Optimus” is displayed at the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai, China, July 6, 2023.
Costfoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Musk, meanwhile, continues to try and focus investor attention elsewhere.
He insists the future of the company hinges on robotaxis and humanoid robotics, two markets that Tesla has yet to meaningfully crack. Tesla is testing its Robotaxi-branded service in limited capacity in some cities, but is way behind Alphabet’s Waymo, which is rapidly expanding commercial operations.
Musk said in March that Tesla aimed to make 5,000 of its Optimus robots this year, but key departures from the group have thrown that plan into question.
In September, Musk wrote on X that “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.” Last year, he predicted that Optimus robots would someday turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company, which was equal to more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 at the time of his comment.
It’s a story that’s compelling enough for some longtime Tesla bulls and Musk fanboys. But at the moment, the company still relies on sales of EVs to drive its business. And in the U.S., while Tesla’s market share may be poised to rise, the overall pie — at least in the near term — appears to be shrinking.
— CNBC’s Mike Wayland contributed to this report
WATCH: Former Ford CEO says EV market didn’t develop way automakers thought
Dario Amodei, co-founder and chief executive officer of Anthropic, at the World Economic Forum in 2025.
Stefan Wermuth | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic on Wednesday announced Claude Haiku 4.5, a small artificial intelligence model that’s available as a lower-cost offering for all of the company’s users.
The model is fast and can outperform other larger models that were considered cutting edge just months ago, Anthropic said.
Claude Haiku 4.5 is better at using computers than Claude Sonnet 4, for instance, which is a midsized model the company launched in May. It performs similarly to Claude Sonnet 4 and OpenAI’s most recent model, GPT-5, at coding, according to SWE-bench Verified, a test set that measures an AI system’s software coding abilities.
“It punches way above its weight,” Mike Krieger, Anthropic’s chief product officer, told CNBC in an interview.
Claude Haiku 4.5 is available to Anthropic’s free users, and it’s now the cheapest model available to paid users.
Jaque Silva | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Anthropic is an AI startup that develops a family of large language models called Claude. The company assigns new numbers to the models as they advance across generations, but the smallest model in the family is typically called Haiku, the midsized model is called Sonnet and the largest model is Opus.
After OpenAI burst onto the scene with the launch of its chatbot ChatGPT in 2022, Anthropic launched a rival product, Claude, the following year. It’s powered by Anthropic’s family of models, and users can choose between free and paid tiers.
The launch of Claude Haiku 4.5 comes just weeks after the company announced Claude Sonnet 4.5 in September and Claude Opus 4.1 in August. Anthropic is working to release another model, likely an updated version of Opus, by the end of this year or early next year, Krieger said.
For paid users, Haiku models are typically around one-third of the cost of Anthropic’s Sonnet models, while Sonnet models are one-fifth of the cost of its Opus models, Krieger said. Anthropic’s free users can still choose to use Claude Sonnet 4.5, but they’ll get more capacity out of Claude Haiku 4.5 since it’s smaller, he added.
Claude Sonnet 4.5 is still Anthropic’s best-performing model, but the company said Claude Haiku 4.5 is ideal for users looking for fast, accurate answers.
“Even for my own use, even though it is not as smart as Sonnet, I’ve started defaulting to it on Claude, especially in the mobile app, because it’s just much faster getting an answer,” Krieger said.
The two models can also work together. Anthropic said Claude Sonnet 4.5 can create multi-step plans to solve complex problems, and Claude Haiku 4.5 can complete subtasks within those plans, for example.
Running the models in parallel could be particularly useful for businesses that want to use AI to tackle longer-term projects, Krieger said.
“You could have Haiku monitoring financial streams of data – and because it’s a smaller, cheaper, faster model, it can do that at a higher volume – and then pass off its early insights to Sonnet to do some deeper analysis,” he said.
Anthropic, which was No. 4 on CNBC’s 2025 Disruptor 50 list and is valued at $183 billion, serves more than 300,000 business customers. Its annual revenue run rate is approaching $7 billion this month, according to an Anthropic spokesperson.
The company has been racing to keep up with competitors like Google and OpenAI, whose valuation has swelled to $500 billion. Following the launch of GPT-5 in August, OpenAI has inked several multibillion-dollar infrastructure deals and released a short-form video app called Sora.
The breakneck pace of the industry doesn’t afford Anthropic much time to get comfortable after a launch. While the company was carrying out the training for Claude Sonnet 4.5, it had already kicked off work on Claude Haiku 4.5.
“We’re really firing on all cylinders,” Krieger said.
WATCH: Anthropic unveils overseas hiring push as rivalry with OpenAI goes global
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