For an organization historically known for operating in the shadows, the CIA is sending a remarkably public message to America’s technology companies: We need you. And perhaps more importantly, we’re changing how we work with you.
“The agency is open for business,” said Jennifer Goff, director of the CIA’s newly established Office of Commercial Partnerships, during a fireside chat at The Cipher Brief Threat Conference. “That is a line that I don’t say lightly, but we are.”
Goff joined Sandra Joyce, vice president of Google Threat Intelligence, for a conversation about the changing relationship between government and industry, the growing importance of commercial innovation to national security, and the challenges of moving at the speed of today’s threats.
While much of the discussion focused on the technological advantages of private industry, Goff offered a particularly interesting perspective from inside the intelligence community: The CIA recognizes it cannot maintain America’s strategic advantage alone. And it is taking steps to make commercial partnerships a more deliberate part of its mission.
A New Office for a Different Kind of Intelligence Competition
Established in January 2026 by CIA Director John Ratcliffe, the Office of Commercial Partnerships represents an evolution in how the agency approaches private-sector engagement.
For Goff, who has spent 28 years with the CIA, the assignment is a departure from her previous operational roles. She began her career as an operations officer, served multiple overseas tours, including as chief and deputy chief of station, and held leadership positions within the agency’s counterterrorism and counterintelligence mission centers.
More recently, she worked with senior CIA leadership on organizational challenges and the need to keep the agency competitive in a rapidly evolving national security environment. Her latest mission is to help the agency build stronger relationships with the companies driving America’s technological and economic advantage.
“We recognize that we cannot do it alone,” Goff said. “We have to lean into those partnerships, leverage what the private sector can bring in terms of technical innovation, and also their insights.”
The office has two primary responsibilities: serving as a strategic focal point for the CIA’s most important private-sector relationships and driving coordinated engagement in industries critical to U.S. national security.
Those areas include critical minerals, biotechnology, robotics, semiconductors, and other sectors where commercial capabilities increasingly shape geopolitical competition.
The distinction is significant. The CIA has engaged with private industry from its inception. What is changing is the recognition that those relationships can no longer be treated primarily as transactional engagements or traditional procurement opportunities. Instead, they need to become a strategic capability.
The Government No Longer Owns the Innovation Advantage
One of Goff’s most consequential observations was about the changing nature of American technological leadership. For much of the last century, the federal government drove technological development through its research investments, acquisition programs, and national security requirements.
In the era of agentic AI, that relationship has fundamentally changed.
“Years ago, 50 years ago, the U.S. government led innovation, technical innovation, and that has been flipped on its head,” Goff said.
Today, the technologies shaping national security competition are often developed for commercial markets first. Artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, semiconductors, and advanced computing are increasingly dual-use capabilities, with implications that extend far beyond the original customer.
The CIA’s approach, Goff explained, is not simply to identify technologies that solve today’s intelligence problems. It is to understand what capabilities will matter next.
“Where do we need to be looking? How do we partner with industry to identify what’s on our horizon? What are the next challenges?” Goff asked.
That means expanding the agency’s relationships beyond established defense and intelligence contractors.
Goff described an engagement strategy that includes commercial companies, national laboratories, academic institutions, and venture capital.
Speed Matters, but Security Isn’t the Enemy
The need to move faster has become a recurring theme across the defense and intelligence community. But for an agency charged with protecting some of the nation’s most sensitive information, speed is not simply a matter of eliminating administrative hurdles.
“Fast and government bureaucracy don’t usually come together,” Goff acknowledged.
She pointed to changes underway in CIA procurement, including greater use of alternative acquisition authorities, as evidence that the agency is trying to address longstanding barriers. During the audience discussion, Goff referenced remarks from CIA leadership about approximately 400 other transaction authorities used over a six-month period. For an agency accustomed to traditional acquisition processes, she characterized that as meaningful progress. But she also cautioned against viewing security requirements as obstacles that should simply be removed.
“I don’t see CI, counterintelligence, and security as a speed bump. I see it as a necessity,” Goff said.
The CIA cannot eliminate the security risks associated with commercial partnerships. Nor should it. But it can reconsider how those risks are evaluated, how requirements are prioritized, and how the agency engages with companies that may be unfamiliar with intelligence community processes.
Goff acknowledged that the CIA has historically been difficult to work with, in part because of its need to protect sensitive missions and capabilities. Some of those challenges will remain. The goal, however, is to become more transparent where possible, identify opportunities earlier, and approach problems with greater flexibility rather than defaulting to traditional processes.
America’s Decentralized Innovation System Is Both a Strength and a Vulnerability
One of the most interesting exchanges came when the discussion turned to the differences between the American innovation model and China’s more centrally directed approach. The United States benefits from a competitive, decentralized private sector that has produced extraordinary technological innovation. But that same decentralization can make coordinated national security action more complicated.
“We take pride as Americans in our capitalist society, and we don’t want to nationalize industry,” she said.
That decentralized system, she argued, is precisely what makes the United States a technological superpower.
But it also creates vulnerabilities when the country faces strategic competitors capable of coordinating government and industry more directly. The answer, in Goff’s view, is not to abandon the American model. It is to build better partnerships within it.
“We need to figure out together how to make America stronger, and we can’t just sit back and let that be a passive engagement at this point,” she said. “We have to take a more proactive measure.”
This is an important distinction in the broader conversation about national security and industrial policy.
The United States does not need to replicate China’s centralized system to compete effectively. But it does need mechanisms that allow government and industry to recognize shared threats, coordinate where appropriate, and translate American technological advantages into national security outcomes.
Goff also emphasized that the CIA is only one participant in that effort.
Effective partnerships require coordination across the federal government, including the departments of Commerce, Treasury, Homeland Security, and Defense, as well as the intelligence community.
The challenge is creating a framework that allows those organizations and their commercial partners to work together without sacrificing the interests, responsibilities, and independence that make the American system effective.
Google: The Threat Landscape Is Already Moving at Machine Speed
Joyce reinforced the urgency of Goff’s message from the commercial technology perspective. She described an increasingly sophisticated cyber threat environment in which artificial intelligence and autonomous agents are fundamentally changing how attacks are developed and executed.
At Google, agentic workflows are already being used to accelerate malware analysis, identify anomalous behavior, and improve threat detection and remediation.
But attackers are adopting similar capabilities.
“We simply cannot wait for a human to triage the things that are happening right now,” Joyce said.
She argued that traditional cybersecurity approaches, including established methods for prioritizing vulnerabilities and staffing defensive operations, are increasingly inadequate for an environment where AI systems can identify and combine weaknesses at machine speed.
Joyce also emphasized that intelligence sharing, while necessary, is not sufficient. Information must be operationalized to disrupt adversaries, including through coordinated efforts to dismantle malicious infrastructure.
She described Google’s work with industry partners to take down residential proxy networks used by hundreds of threat actors, arguing that disruption should become a continuous and increasingly automated function.
Her remarks illustrated why the CIA’s evolving commercial engagement strategy matters.
Private companies are not simply developing technologies the government might eventually purchase. They are already operating on the front lines of emerging national security threats, generating intelligence, and taking actions that can affect adversary capabilities.
For the intelligence community, the opportunity is not just access to better technology. It is access to a broader ecosystem of insight, expertise, and operational capability.
A New Playbook for Intelligence Partnerships
For decades, the national security community has discussed the importance of public-private partnerships. But the pace of technological change, the scale of global competition, and the growing role of commercial companies in intelligence and security are forcing a more fundamental reconsideration of how those partnerships operate.
The CIA is acknowledging that its future advantage depends not only on the capabilities it develops internally, but also on how effectively it connects with the broader American innovation ecosystem.
For traditional government contractors, that may mean new opportunities for engagement and a greater emphasis on commercial innovation. For emerging technology companies, it could mean a clearer pathway into national security missions. And for the workforce, it underscores the growing value of professionals who can operate across the boundaries of intelligence, technology, business, and government.
The CIA will always have unique missions, security requirements, and responsibilities that distinguish it from the commercial sector. But the strategic advantage of the United States has never rested exclusively within government. It rests in the people, companies, research institutions, and technologies that collectively make American innovation possible.
And for an agency historically reluctant to say much publicly, declaring itself open for business is a significant place to start.
