Anthropic submitted two sworn declarations to a California federal court docket late Friday afternoon, pushing again on the Pentagon’s assertion that the AI firm poses an “unacceptable threat to nationwide safety” and arguing that the authorities’s case depends on technical misunderstandings and claims that had been by no means really raised throughout the months of negotiations that preceded the dispute.
The declarations had been filed alongside Anthropic’s reply transient in its lawsuit in opposition to the Division of Protection and are available forward of a listening to this coming Tuesday, March 24, before Choose Rita Lin in San Francisco.
The dispute traces again to late February, when President Trump and Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly declared they had been slicing ties with Anthropic after the firm refused to enable unrestricted army use of its AI expertise.
The 2 individuals who submitted the declarations are Sarah Heck, Anthropic’s Head of Coverage, and Thiyagu Ramasamy, the firm’s Head of Public Sector.
Heck is a former Nationwide Safety Council official who labored at the White Home underneath the Obama administration before shifting to Stripe after which Anthropic, the place she runs the firm’s authorities relationships and coverage work. She was personally current at the February 24 assembly the place CEO Dario Amodei sat down with Protection Secretary Hegseth and the Pentagon’s Below Secretary Emil Michael.
In her declaration, Heck calls out what she describes as a central falsehood in the authorities’s filings: that Anthropic demanded some form of approval position over army operations. That declare, she says, merely isn’t true. “At no time throughout Anthropic’s negotiations with the Division did I or every other Anthropic worker state that the firm needed that form of position,” she wrote.
She additionally claims that the Pentagon’s concern about Anthropic doubtlessly disabling or altering its expertise mid-operation was by no means raised throughout negotiations. As an alternative, she says, it appeared for the first time in the authorities’s court docket filings, which gave Anthropic no alternative to reply.
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One other element in Heck’s declaration positive to draw consideration is that on March 4 — the day after the Pentagon formally finalized its supply-chain threat designation in opposition to Anthropic — Below Secretary Michael emailed Amodei to say the two sides had been “very shut” on the two points the authorities now cites as proof that Anthropic is a nationwide safety menace: its positions on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of People.
The e-mail, which Heck attaches as an exhibit to her declaration, is value studying alongside what Michael mentioned publicly in the days afterward. On March 5, Amodei revealed an announcement saying the firm had been having “productive conversations” with the Pentagon. The day after that, Michael posted on X that “there is no lively Division of Battle negotiation with Anthropic.” Every week after that, he instructed CNBC there was “no probability” of renewed talks.
Heck’s level seems to be: If Anthropic’s stance on these two points is what makes it a nationwide safety menace, why was the Pentagon’s personal official saying the two sides had been almost aligned on precisely these points proper after the designation was finalized? (She stops in need of saying the authorities used the designation as a bargaining chip, however the timeline she lays out leaves the query hanging.)
Ramasamy brings a special form of experience to the case. Earlier than becoming a member of Anthropic in 2025, he spent six years at Amazon Internet Providers managing AI deployments for presidency prospects, together with labeled environments. At Anthropic, he’s credited with constructing the staff that introduced its Claude fashions into nationwide safety and protection settings, together with the $200 million contract with the Pentagon introduced final summer time.
His declaration takes on the authorities’s declare that Anthropic may theoretically intrude with army operations by disabling the expertise or in any other case altering the way it behaves, which Ramasamy says isn’t technically doable. Per his telling, as soon as Claude is deployed inside a government-secured, “air-gapped” system operated by a third-party contractor, Anthropic has no entry to it; there is no distant kill change, no backdoor, and no mechanism to push unauthorized updates. Any form of “operational veto” is a fiction, he suggests, explaining {that a} change to the mannequin would require the Pentagon’s specific approval and motion to set up.
Anthropic, he says, can’t even see what authorities customers are typing into the system, not to mention extract that information.
Ramasamy additionally disputes the authorities’s declare that Anthropic’s hiring of overseas nationals makes the firm a safety threat. He notes that Anthropic workers have undergone U.S. authorities safety clearance vetting — the similar background test course of required for entry to labeled information — including in his declaration that “to my information,” Anthropic is the solely AI firm the place cleared personnel really constructed the AI fashions designed to run in labeled environments.
Anthropic’s lawsuit argues that the supply-chain threat designation — the first ever utilized to an American firm — quantities to authorities retaliation for the firm’s publicly acknowledged views on AI security, in violation of the First Modification.
The federal government, in a 40-page submitting earlier this week, rejected that framing entirely, saying that Anthropic’s refusal to enable all lawful army makes use of of its expertise was a enterprise choice, not protected speech, and that the designation was an easy nationwide safety name and not punishment for the firm’s views.
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