Anthropic submitted two sworn declarations to a California federal court late Friday afternoon, pushing back on the Pentagon’s assertion that the AI company poses an “unacceptable risk to national security” and arguing that the government’s case relies on technical misunderstandings and claims that were never actually raised during the months of negotiations that preceded the dispute.
The declarations were filed alongside Anthropic’s reply brief in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense and come ahead of a hearing this coming Tuesday, March 24, before Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco.
The dispute traces back to late February, when President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly declared they were cutting ties with Anthropic after the company refused to allow unrestricted military use of its AI technology.
The two people who submitted the declarations are Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s Head of Policy, and Thiyagu Ramasamy, the company’s Head of Public Sector.
Heck is a former National Security Council official who worked at the White House under the Obama administration before moving to Stripe and then Anthropic, where she runs the company’s government relationships and policy work. She was personally present at the February 24 meeting where CEO Dario Amodei sat down with Defense Secretary Hegseth and the Pentagon’s Under Secretary Emil Michael.
In her declaration, Heck calls out what she describes as a central falsehood in the government’s filings: that Anthropic demanded some kind of approval role over military operations. That claim, she says, simply isn’t true. “At no time during Anthropic’s negotiations with the Department did I or any other Anthropic employee state that the company wanted that kind of role,” she wrote.
She also claims that the Pentagon’s concern about Anthropic potentially disabling or altering its technology mid-operation was never raised during negotiations. In …