Nand Mulchandani

Profile

Nand Mulchandani is the translator between two worlds that usually don’t speak the same language: Silicon Valley and the US national security establishment. He spent two decades in the startup trenches — co-founding and selling four companies (Oblix to Oracle, Determina to VMware, OpenDNS to Cisco, and ScaleXtreme to Citrix) — before taking the job almost nobody in his peer group would take: teaching the Pentagon and the CIA how to build and ship software the way a modern tech company does.

From 2019 to 2022 he was CTO (and briefly acting director) of the Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, where he pushed a venture-capital-style portfolio model for AI programs, argued loudly that “war is a software problem,” and tried to drag DoD procurement toward agile iteration instead of decade-long waterfall. In June 2022 he was sworn in as the CIA’s first-ever Chief Technology Officer — a role that simply didn’t exist before him. He served exactly three years to the day, stepping down in June 2025 and staying on as an advisor.

What makes Mulchandani interesting for developers is that he’s one of the few senior government officials who actually speaks the language of shipping. He pushed the CIA toward generative AI adoption but publicly stayed cautious on hallucinations and provenance — an unusually honest stance from someone whose agency had every incentive to sound bullish. His frame is that AI augments analysts rather than replacing them, and that the hardest problem in government AI isn’t the model, it’s the data, the procurement contract, and the classification boundary.

He’s now a Visiting Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution for 2025-26, working with the Technology Policy Accelerator on defense-tech innovation and “preventing strategic technical surprise.” If you want to understand how the US government actually adopts AI — not the press-release version, the real version with appropriations and classified networks and 40-year-old databases — Mulchandani is one of the clearest voices in the room.

Key Articles & Papers

Insider Q&A: CIA's chief technologist's cautious embrace of generative AI 2024 — AP interview where Mulchandani lays out the CIA's measured approach to LLMs — useful for augmenting analysts, not to be trusted blindly. Intelligence in the Age of AI (a16z Podcast) 2024 — With Martin Casado at a16z's American Dynamism Summit — the best long-form conversation on how intelligence work changes when analysts get AI tools. Making War A Software Problem: JAIC Director On JADC2 2020 — Mulchandani's core argument while running JAIC: code iterates faster than hardware, so software becomes the decisive military advantage. The Pentagon's AI Shop Takes A Venture Capital Approach to Funding Tech 2020 — How he tried to transplant portfolio-style bets and kill-fast decisions into Pentagon procurement. JAIC Wants AI 'Victory Gardens' Across DoD 2020 — His plan to build a one-stop-shop of tools, cleaned datasets, and contracting vehicles so any DoD unit could run its own AI projects. CIA Names First Chief Technology Officer 2022 — The CIA's own announcement of Mulchandani's hire — notable because the agency rarely introduces new executives publicly. Former CIA CTO Nand Mulchandani Named Visiting Fellow at Hoover 2025 — Announcement of his post-government role focused on defense-tech innovation and strategic surprise. Technovation: The CIA's CTO on AI and National Security 2023 — Peter High interview covering how the CIA builds relationships with Silicon Valley and adapts to great-power competition.

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