Burns spent three decades on whether a claim about critical materials could be checked or only taken on trust. SAGINT issues one Digital Warehouse Receipt per lot, recording where the material came from and who has held it since.

AUSTIN, Texas, Sept. 14, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — SAGINT^®, Inc. today announced that Maura Burns, former Chief Operating Officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, has joined its board of advisors. In this role she will advise SAGINT on the evidence standard a Digital Warehouse Receipt must meet, including origin, custody, control and assay computed from the producer’s own process data, for producers, primes and auditors operating under tightening material-origin rules.

Burns retired in 2025 as Chief Operating Officer of the Central Intelligence Agency, where she ran the agency’s global business operations and led the work of modernizing its technology, building partnerships with private industry to bring artificial intelligence, advanced cybersecurity and next-generation collection platforms into the mission. She is recognized for driving enterprise-wide change that improved efficiency and accelerated innovation at Fortune 200 scale.

Earlier she led the agency’s Weapons and Counterproliferation Mission Center, directing more than 500 engineers, analysts, scientists and operators against threats spanning the nuclear fuel cycle, space and counterspace security, and biosecurity, and aligning U.S. and allied efforts to safeguard critical technologies. Across three decades she has been a trusted advisor to senior leaders and policymakers, and her service has been recognized with two Presidential Rank Awards, the Distinguished Intelligence Medal, the Director’s Award for Distinguished Service and the Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal.

“In counterproliferation, confirming where material came from and its specific characteristics and amounts was a challenge, especially when nefarious actors were trying to obfuscate the details,” said Burns. “A document can assert anything; it cannot demonstrate anything. What drew me to SAGINT is that the Digital Warehouse Receipt is built the other way around. Origin, custody and control are computed from the producer’s own process data at the lot, and re-verified each time that lot changes hands, so the record travels with the material instead of being reconstructed after it has moved. That is a better foundation for the decisions industry, lenders and government have to make about critical material, and I am glad to help this team build it well.”

The appointment comes as the evidence standard for covered material is changing. Effective January 1, 2027, the restriction under 10 U.S.C. § 4872 and DFARS 225.7018-2 widens from covered material melted or produced in a covered country to covered material mined, refined, separated, melted or produced in a covered country. A July 20, 2026 executive order, “Securing America’s Defense Supply Chains and Ensuring Domestic Acquisition of Critical Materials,” separately directs the Secretary of War to develop policy and implementation guidance requiring prime contractors and subcontractors, on a timetable the Department will set, to map critical supply chains and submit an indentured bill of materials tracing components, parts, equipment, software and materials back to the origin of raw materials.

SAGINT issues one Digital Warehouse Receipt per lot. The lot’s origin, custody chain, control state and assay are computed from the producer’s own process data rather than typed into a document, re-verified at every transfer, and rendered differently for each reader (the prime, the lender, the underwriter, the auditor, the regulator) without any of them seeing proprietary data. SAGINT supplies computed evidence; compliance determinations remain the contractor’s.

“We are honored that Maura is joining us,” said Jacob Clayton, Chief Executive Officer of SAGINT. “She spent three decades on the question our work exists to answer: how do you know that a claim about material is true? She led the engineers, analysts and operators who had to answer it where the consequences were real. January 1 is a real deadline for real companies, and most of them are finding that the evidence the rule asks for was never collected in the first place. We have been in production on real material since January, and Maura’s judgment is what we want alongside us.”

Burns’s views are her own. Her appointment does not imply endorsement by the Central Intelligence Agency or any other agency of the United States Government.

About SAGINT

SAGINT^® is the warehouse receipt for global trade. Warehouse receipts have financed trade for centuries on faith; SAGINT replaces the faith with evidence. It issues one Digital Warehouse Receipt per lot: the lot’s origin, custody chain, assay and control state, computed from the producer’s own process data rather than asserted in a document, and re-verified at every transfer. SAGINT, Inc. is a Texas corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas, in production on real material since January 2026.

SAGINT never trades, finances or takes title. It is not a broker, dealer, exchange or alternative trading system, and operates exclusively noncustodially.

Material moves. Proof moves with it. More at sagint.com.

SAGINT^® is a registered trademark of SAGINT, Inc.

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