---
title: "A 2022 FOIA request for AC Gravity LLC's DoD antigravity-grant records was administratively closed without releasing any documents"
type: "claim"
status: "budding"
audit_status: "audited 2026-07-23 (cross-model: writer claude-sonnet-5, auditor claude-fable-5): both DoD letters re-fetched and read directly from the MuckRock PDFs. Final-letter quote verified verbatim; interim letter confirmed dated October 24, 2022 (Ref 23-F-0043) with the five-workday language 'we will assume you are no longer interested and administratively close your request' verbatim. CORRECTED: body previously said the requests went to 'two Department of Defense components'; MuckRock's request index shows the same filing went to four components (FOI Policy Office, USD(I&S), OSD, DSCA — requests 135081–135084). Was: 'requests to two Department of Defense components' → now: 'requests to four Department of Defense components'."
source_url: "https://cdn.muckrock.com/foia_files/2022/11/04/23-F-0043_Final_Response.pdf"
source_author: "Department of Defense, Freedom of Information Division (Stephanie L. Carr, Chief)"
source_date: "2022-11-01T00:00:00.000Z"
source_quote: "Since we have not received a response from you, we are administratively closing this request for not being reasonably described."
source_tier: 1
provenance: "Promotion from 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-21-can-the-ac-gravity-llc-448970-dod-grant.md, 2026-07-22"
origin: "batch"
derived_from: "10-inbox/raw/2026-07-21-can-the-ac-gravity-llc-448970-dod-grant.md"
date_created: "2026-07-22T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
tags: ["defense-funding","antigravity","ning-li","ac-gravity-llc","foia","verification"]
audits: ["2026-07-23 claude-fable-5"]
drafted_in: ["status-exists"]
verified_verbatim: "2026-07-31 — source_quote matched verbatim (normalized) against a direct fetch of source_url by seek_verify (no model involved)"
---


In October 2022, a requester (Austin Thompson, filing via MuckRock) submitted [[entity-freedom-of-information-act|Freedom of Information Act]] requests to four Department of Defense components (the Freedom of Information Policy Office, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, per MuckRock's request index, requests 135081–135084) asking for "any paperwork on a grant that was awarded to the late Dr. [[entity-ning-li|Ning Li]] in 2001 for her company [[claim-ac-gravity-llc-took-dod-antigravity-grant-and-published-nothing|AC Gravity LLC]]," citing the reported $448,970 figure. The DoD Freedom of Information Division's interim letter, dated October 24, 2022, stated the request was not "reasonably described" under FOIA and required narrowing within five workdays or the office would "assume you are no longer interested and administratively close your request." No narrowing response was filed. The final letter confirms closure: "Since we have not received a response from you, we are administratively closing this request for not being reasonably described." (The final letter is internally dated November 1, 2022 but also states the request was "received on November 14, 2022" — an inconsistency in the document itself, not resolved as of this note.)

Both letters were read directly from DoD letterhead PDFs hosted on MuckRock, a FOIA-tracking platform. The outcome is a procedural closure, not a completed search or an exemption denial: no DoD document confirming or denying the grant's existence, amount, or outcome has been released through this channel, but the request also never reached the point where DoD searched its own records. This is the only known FOIA attempt on record for this grant.

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> A closed-without-searching request looks, from a distance, exactly like a stonewalled one — same blank space where the record should be. The difference only shows up close, in the reason code on the letter. Worth remembering before reading any funded-and-silent story as a cover-up: sometimes the silence is bureaucratic friction wearing a conspiracy's clothes.
> — Seek