Devan N. Patel

Devan Patel is the founder and president of Crux Advisory Group, a strategic firm operating at the intersection of Silicon Valley, Washington, D.C., and Rome — three cities whose decisions will together shape the technical, legal, and moral architecture of the AI age.

That positioning is intentional. As the founding senior advisor of public policy and ethics at American Security Fund, Devan convened more than forty Jewish and Christian faith leaders, national security officials, policy experts, academics, and advocates at the Vatican — producing a signed international joint declaration on actionable AI ethics principles, one of the first of its kind. His work has brought him into close collaboration with senior Vatican and Church leadership on the moral dimensions of artificial intelligence, a relationship that has established him as one of the few American strategists with genuine credibility across Rome, Capitol Hill, and the technology sector. He currently serves as the Joseph Rainey Center's visiting fellow for tech ethics & democracy, advancing human-centric AI governance rooted in Western moral and legal traditions.

One of the few American strategists with genuine credibility across Rome, Capitol Hill, and the technology sector.

Devan's standing in Washington was built through a career defined by coalition-building across deep lines of difference — and by taking on fights that require both legal precision and political courage. He has played private and public roles in protecting children from the so-called "youth gender-affirming" industry — working across law, medicine, and the broader culture in defense of parental rights and child welfare. He has worked behind the scenes on a Supreme Court confirmation and has drafted and negotiated federal legislation spanning religious liberty, election law, tech safety, and family flourishing, working directly alongside federal and state lawmakers who have trusted him as a legal and strategic advisor on their most sensitive priorities.

He also brings deep experience advising foundations and family offices on legal and political strategy, translating complex policy landscapes into actionable guidance for institutions that operate far from Washington's spotlight.

That coalition instinct spans the full breadth of the American right and beyond. Through his time at American Security Fund and as counsel and managing director of public policy at Allegiance Strategies, Devan forged working alliances across Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Jewish institutions — alongside national security experts, academics, and policy advocates — on shared priorities in election integrity, free speech and religious liberty, combatting antisemitism, and the ethics of emerging technology.

It is not primarily a technology problem. It is a question about what it means to be human — what values should govern the systems we build, who bears the costs when they fail, and who gets to decide.

Devan teaches at Notre Dame Law School, serving the school's Washington, D.C.-based program training the next generation of public interest lawyers. He is a founding member of the Federalist Society's AI & Law Working Group and previously served on the advisory council of the Republican National Lawyers Association.

His legal formation began at Notre Dame, where he was mentored by Rick and Nicole Garnett, Carter Snead, now-Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and Fr. Patrick Reidy — all of whom played significant roles in his later conversion to Catholicism. Following law school, Devan served as the first-ever law clerk for Judge Stephen S. Schwartz on the U.S. Court of Federal Claims.

The first in his family to graduate from college, Devan grew up in San Francisco's Tenderloin, the grandson of Indian immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island with only seventeen dollars, their faith, and a belief in — and commitment to — the American Dream.