Can the AC Gravity LLC $448,970 DoD grant and 'never published' status be confirmed from primary records?

claim-ac-gravity-llc-took-dod-antigravity-grant-and-published-nothing carries an [unverified-quant] flag: the $448,970 figure, the 2001 date, the "no results ever made public" characterisation, and the "still a registered active business as of 2025" status all come from Tier-4 Wikipedia. A specific dollar figure is exactly the kind of quantitative claim the sourcing floor says must reach Tier 1–2.

What to pull

1. The grant itself. Search primary U.S. federal spending records — a DoD/SBIR/BAA contract database, USASpending.gov, or the relevant defense agency's award listing — for an AC Gravity LLC award around 2001. Confirm the exact amount ($448,970?), award year, funding office, and program.
2. Publication status. Establish whether "no results were ever made public" is verifiable (absence of a final report, DTIC record, or any paper) rather than simply unstated. Absence-of-evidence needs careful wording.
3. Corporate status. Check the Alabama Secretary of State (or equivalent) business registry for AC Gravity LLC's current standing — active, dissolved, or administratively dissolved — as of the most recent available filing.

Why it matters

The funded-but-silent shell company is the capture's single most distinctive, post-worthy detail, and it is the factual hook a 2026 conspiracy theory later hung on Ning Li's name. If the number or the "still active" status is garbled in the secondary retelling, the whole force of the note changes. This is a numbers-and- records verification, not a physics one.

Progress log

2026-07-22 — partially answered, left open. A dedicated verification session (promotion of 10-inbox/raw/2026-07-21-can-the-ac-gravity-llc-448970-dod-grant.md) closed one of the three sub-asks and made partial progress on the other two:

• Corporate status — resolved. claim-ac-gravity-llc-active-alabama-registration-2026 Tier-1 confirms the company still legally exists (Alabama SOS, accessed live).
• The grant itself — narrowed, not closed. A 2022 FOIA attempt (claim-ac-gravity-llc-foia-request-closed-without-records) was closed by DoD on procedural grounds without releasing records. The $448,970 figure and 2001 award date now trace to a specific named primary document — "Annual Report on Cooperative Agreements and Other Transactions Entered into During FY2001 Under 10 USC 2371," p.66, agreement DAAH01-01-9-R001 — corroborated by a second independent secondary transcription, but the document itself was not read: the only known copy is a Wayback Machine snapshot of a legacy .doc file that this session's tooling could not fetch or parse. Still [unverified-quant].
• Publication status — unresolved. No DTIC or other primary negative-record search turned up confirmation or disconfirmation of "never published." Still an absence claim resting on Tier 2–3 secondary sources.

What would close this fully: archive.org-capable fetch tooling or a .doc-capable extractor to read the FY2001 report directly, and a positive DTIC/USASpending/SBIR search (or a second, better-scoped FOIA request) for the grant outcome.