Bletchley

For three years, the machinery for governing frontier AI has been a series of summits.

It started at Bletchley Park in the UK in 2023, then Seoul in 2024, then Paris in 2025.

And those were governments talking to governments.

Governments convening governments.

Wait, it went backwards? I'd have assumed it built up.

It thinned out.

Bletchley got 28 nations to sign a declaration and stand up the first safety institutes.

Seoul got voluntary pledges.

This week, King Charles convened a room to ask the labs whether they can even agree on a shared set of principles at all, which, quick aside, is the exact pattern we've watched for years now.

Bletchley, then Seoul, then Paris.

Each big summit's promises landing a little less binding than the one before.

Whether this one breaks that pattern is its own story, genuinely its own episode.

Sam Dawes from Oxford University said there were reasons to be optimistic.

He pointed to a number of multilateral efforts, including the UK's AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park in 2023.

The Bletchley process that, uh, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak-

Mm

... um, initiated was an important minilateral, which has continued through different incarnations in different countries, Seoul, Paris, New Delhi.

I mean, I held a top-secret SCI special access clearance program for a quarter of a century.

And when you... you know i want the hammer okay i expect the hammer and then you know you get characters like edward snowden uh but that's the modern world we want to stick back to your history of this facility in world war ii which literally fascinating to me to me it's almost like a mecca uh you know as a code breaker when i the first time i went to bletchley you know i i could have salaamed five times a day at this place and you know saw things one of the first books i ever read when I joined the military was hut six.

And even for a very long time, as I was going through the school of cryptologic intelligence, I had a hard time processing, processing the history, not the technical aspects, but the whole thing of collection, right? You collect enemy communications, they're encrypted.

Then you have to process those through a series of of teams that will do various code breaking then getting it down to a machine that you have to work out how it actually works and so i learned quite a bit as a matter of fact i really found out just last year when i went there last year um that i didn't really know much about the lorenz you know, machine.

I've worked at Fort Meade.

I've been in some of the places of the greats here in U.S. Navy cryptology.

But when you go to bletchley park you just think about the in not just as you say the enormous effort the impact on everything and then you know when you go to a place like the churchill war rooms you know and you you think about how i think it was the bombing of bristol that churchill had it's very advanced knowledge that you know nor is it birmingham bristol

i feel like it might be coventry Coventry? Why am I thinking of

And then suddenly Downing Street had a call from the palace saying the Queen would like to know what she's supposed to be doing because she wants to be part of this.

And, you know, suddenly it clicked her fingers and the royal train came out of the sidings in Bletchley and she jumped aboard and went down to Cornwall, met all the world leaders and then came back and had tea with the Bidens on the Sunday.

So, you know, she wanted to be...

I think she derived enormous sense of purpose from... out of being queen.

Do you know what I mean? Wouldn't it be fun to take all of that energy and those emotions and then refract it through a nice genre story with exciting elements for the listeners? Do you know what I mean? So like, so yeah, when I think of a character, you know, and I want to tell a story in a certain context or place, I often do think, well, how, how, what is, what is making that person an outsider and how do they use that? as their sort of energy or their insight or their superpower, really, that helps them crack this.

Did you ever see the British television show The Bletchley Circle?

Yes.

Oh, my gosh.

I love The Bletchley Circle.

It's great, right? It's great.

It's almost like the best version of The Avengers possible because you think about it, each one of them has their own special superpower and they come to get you.

look, what did you do during the war? I saved the world.

brought it together.

He did a huge amount on AI safety, and the summit at Bletchley was a very important international that has been followed up.

So I don't think we can say the government is asleep on the job.

The question is, how do they respond...

Yeah, he does have that vision.

He did tell Rishi Sunak, the British prime minister, to do the international conference of Bletchley in late 2023 to try to get lots of different AI leaders from all around the world, including the Chinese in the room.

So yes, he is by instinct very much an internationalist.

I think, I mean, my sense of Dario Amadei's position is it's less that he's thrilled about American Germany and more that he is horrified by Chinese Germany.