40 Years of Advancing Software for National Security

In 2025, the SEI marked its 40th anniversary as a cornerstone of advancing software as a strategic advantage for national security. The Department of War (DoW) established the SEI as a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) at Carnegie Mellon University in 1984, and the institute began operation in early 1985. For four decades, the SEI has worked to make software do more, be more secure, deploy faster, and cost less, improving software systems vital to national defense and the broader information technology ecosystem.

Addressing an audience of SEI researchers, government partners, and CMU faculty and staff at a September 2025 event, CMU President Farnam Jahanian noted the prescience of the SEI’s establishment. “Forty years ago, the DoD grew its partnership with CMU, driven by the foresight that reliable and secure software would play a defining role in supporting national defense and national security. It was way ahead of its time.”

The DoW’s Michael J. Holthe, then performing the duties of assistant secretary of defense for science and technology, commented on how CMU and the DoW have created a technology ecosystem in Pittsburgh that benefits the American military and beyond. “With software central to modern warfare, from weapon systems to communications and intelligence, SEI offers our warfighters the secure, high-quality software systems they can rely on,” he said. “SEI’s legacy of innovation and leadership continues to be vital for ensuring our collective digital future.”

The SEI has been at the forefront of technology transformations that changed how the DoW provides capabilities and protects its systems and networks. Early on, the SEI recognized the importance of software process improvement and evolved the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) framework for assessing an organization’s software process maturity. Following the Morris Worm attack in 1988, the SEI became a leader in incident response, vulnerability analysis, and cybersecurity research. The SEI led a third key technology transformation in software architecture, particularly through creation of the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL), which enabled modeling and analysis of complex systems. And in the last decade, the SEI has advanced artificial intelligence (AI) from bespoke solutions and isolated algorithms toward an AI engineering discipline and an AI system development lifecycle.

Software technology will continue to transform, and more rapidly. AI-enabled software systems, socio-technical systems, and quantum computing systems will fundamentally shift software engineering, especially as software development becomes AI-enabled. Cybersecurity operations will depend on AI and machine learning to detect and repair software vulnerabilities, identify risk exposure better and faster, and respond to adversaries. The challenge of developing and designing trustworthy AI systems will be a key focus for the AI Engineering discipline, ensuring that these systems are explainable, reliable, responsible, safe, fair, and transparent.

As an FFRDC the SEI can focus on long-term, mission-critical research driven not by profit but by the need to solve hard DoW problems. The SEI contributed to the development of the Software Acquisition Pathway, which earlier this year the DoW adopted as its preferred pathway for all software development components. In late 2024, the Pentagon officially established the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC), co-created by the SEI, to secure the defense industrial base supply chain against cyber threats. The first-of-its-kind SEI AI Security Incident Response Team (AISIRT) is in its third year of identifying, analyzing, and responding to the threats, vulnerabilities, and incidents that emerge from advances in AI and machine learning. As part of its remit to transition industry technology to the DoW, SEI experts frequently collaborate with the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which accelerates adoption of commercial and dual-use technology across the department. Since 2020, the SEI has led a national initiative in engineering AI for defense and national security sponsored by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The SEI also works with acquisition programs to apply industry best practices such as Agile and continuous deployment of capability, stand up software factories, and implement zero-trust architectures.

“To continue to make a difference for the DoW as the future unfolds means anticipating change and making it work to the DoW’s advantage in its software ecosystem,” said SEI Director and CEO Paul Nielsen.

In the next 40 years, the SEI will continue to evolve. It will determine and lead new areas of research not because a technology is novel but because it can support the DoW mission. Meeting that goal means exploring new technologies and integrating them into complex systems at scale, reliably and securely. It also means developing practices, policies, guidance, and workforce training to support the technology’s adoption, use, and sustainment.

The SEI’s impact on software engineering, cybersecurity, and AI engineering has created an enduring legacy. “Our history proves that we are always in position to provide key guidance on the next big thing in software technology,” said Nielsen. The SEI commits to research and development that addresses tough problems confronting national defense and security, today and in the future, and looks ahead to do the research that enables the DoW to respond well, wisely, and swiftly to challenges. As the world moves into a future dominated by increasingly complex software systems, cyber threats, and AI, the SEI will continue to shape the evolution of these fields. With a past rooted in technological excellence and a future focused on innovation, the SEI’s next 40 years promise to be as impactful as the last.