All-Source Intelligence
The first Chief Technology Officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, former Silicon Valley executive Nand Mulchandani, declared in a panel on Wednesday on the main stage of the Walter E. Washington convention center in Washington, D.C. that: “The idea of Silicon Valley leaning into government and national defense, that’s done. I mean, I think that debate’s over.” 1
Immediately before joining the U.S. spying agency, Mulchandani occupied a similar position within the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC, pronounced “Jake”), the component of the Pentagon which led the widely discussed Project Maven, the pathfinder project of the so-called “Third Offset Strategy” of countering China through militarized artificial intelligence. Mulchandani’s tenure at the JAIC began one year after Google workers famously protested participation in Maven’s drone targeting program and ended as the center was integrated into the newly formed Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO). “For me, the seminal event was sort of the Project Maven thing of like, Silicon Valley not wanting to work with Washington. That’s gone. That’s been long erased,” he stated.
Sitting next to CDAO deputy director Margeret Palmieri, Mulchandani added that: “for the vast majority of Silicon Valley, especially with Ukraine, Israel and these types of events, I think national defense and economic defense and technology are all now one thing. And I think everyone is leaning into it.” 2 (In the last month, Google fired more than 50 workers for protesting its support for the Israeli military through a roughly $1.2 billion cloud contract shared with Amazon.)
