Court filing shows Pentagon told Anthropic alignment was near a week after Trump declared relationship over

Anthropic filed two sworn declarations with a California federal court late on Friday afternoon, challenging the Pentagon's claim that the AI company represents an "unacceptable risk to national security." The company argues that the government's case relies on technical misunderstandings and assertions that were never brought up during the months of negotiations leading up to the dispute.

The declarations accompanied Anthropic's reply brief in its lawsuit against the Department of Defense, filed just before a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, March 24, before Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco.

The dispute dates back to late February, when President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced they were severing ties with Anthropic after the company declined to permit unrestricted military use of its AI technology.

The two individuals 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 served in the White House during the Obama administration before moving to Stripe and later to Anthropic, where she oversees the company's government relations and policy efforts. She was personally present at the February 24 meeting where CEO Dario Amodei met with Defense Secretary Hegseth and Pentagon Under Secretary Emil Michael.

In her declaration, Heck highlights what she calls a central falsehood in the government's filings: that Anthropic sought some form of approval authority over military operations. That claim, she says, is simply untrue. "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 notes that the Pentagon's concern about Anthropic potentially disabling or altering its technology mid-operation was never mentioned during negotiations. Instead, she says, it surfaced for the first time in the government's court filings, providing Anthropic no chance to respond.

Another detail in Heck's declaration that is likely to attract attention is that on March 4 — the day after the Pentagon formally finalized its supply-chain risk designation against Anthropic — Under Secretary Michael emailed Amodei stating that the two sides were "very close" on the two issues the government now cites as evidence that Anthropic is a national security threat: its stances on autonomous weapons and mass surveillance of Americans.

The email, which Heck includes as an exhibit to her declaration, is worth reading alongside Michael's public statements in the following days. On March 5, Amodei released a statement saying the company had been having "productive conversations" with the Pentagon. The next day, Michael posted on X that "there is no active Department of War negotiation with Anthropic." A week later, he told CNBC there was "no chance" of renewed discussions.

Heck's point seems to be: If Anthropic's stance on those two issues is what makes it a national security threat, why was the Pentagon's own official stating that the two sides were nearly aligned on those very issues right after the designation was finalized?

Ramasamy brings a different type of expertise to the case. Before joining Anthropic in 2025, he spent six years at Amazon Web Services overseeing AI deployments for government clients, including classified environments. At Anthropic, he is credited with building the team that introduced its Claude models into national security and defense contexts, including the $200 million contract with the Pentagon announced last summer.

His declaration addresses the government's claim that Anthropic could theoretically interfere with military operations by disabling the technology or altering its behavior, which Ramasamy says is not technically feasible. According to him, once Claude is deployed within a government-secured, "air-gapped" system operated by a third-party contractor, Anthropic has no access to it; there is no remote kill switch, no backdoor, and no mechanism to push unauthorized updates. Any notion of an "operational veto" is a fiction, he suggests, explaining that any change to the model would require explicit Pentagon approval and action to install.

Anthropic, he says, cannot even see what government users are typing into the system, let alone extract that data.

Ramasamy also challenges the government's claim that Anthropic's hiring of foreign nationals makes the company a security risk. He notes that Anthropic employees have undergone U.S. government security clearance vetting — the same background check process required for access to classified information — adding in his declaration that "to my knowledge," Anthropic is the only AI company where cleared personnel actually built the AI models designed to operate in classified environments.

Anthropic's lawsuit argues that the supply-chain risk designation — the first ever applied to an American company — constitutes government retaliation for the company's publicly stated views on AI safety, in violation of the First Amendment.

The government, in a 40-page filing earlier this week, rejected that interpretation entirely, stating that Anthropic's refusal to permit all lawful military uses of its technology was a business decision, not protected speech, and that the designation was a straightforward national security determination, not punishment for the company's views.