Technology History | Bletchley Park — A Summit About Disclosure, in a House Built on Secrecy

The house in the photograph kept its own work secret for about thirty years, which is part of why the summit was held here. On 1 November 2023 the United Kingdom opened a two-day meeting on frontier AI at Bletchley Park and published the Bletchley Declaration, signed that day by twenty-eight countries and the European Union. The signatories included the United States and China, which is the fact that made the page unusual. Around 150 people came from governments, companies, universities and civil society, among them the US vice president Kamala Harris and the European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, with Rishi Sunak hosting and King Charles III addressing the room by video. The declaration runs to a few pages and commits nobody to anything enforceable. What it does is agree on a description: that the sharpest risks sit at the frontier, in highly capable general-purpose models, and that the danger runs through misuse and through loss of control, with cybersecurity and biotechnology named directly. It puts a particular responsibility on the organisations building those systems, and asks for testing, evaluation and transparency about what the models can do. Alongside it, several leading developers — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, Microsoft and Meta among them — agreed to let governments test new models before public release. The British government described the agreement as a world first, which is a claim about the meeting rather than about the ideas in it. The declaration closes by looking ahead to a further meeting in 2024, and it kept collecting names afterwards: New Zealand joined on 23 October 2024. Choosing this address was not subtle. Bletchley Park is where the Government Code and Cypher School broke German ciphers from 1939, work that stayed classified into the 1970s and left the people who did it unable to say what they had done. A summit about disclosing what machines can do, held in a house built on not disclosing anything, is a joke the organisers presumably intended. The mansion is open as a museum, and the Colossus rebuild runs in Block H a few minutes' walk north, at The National Museum of Computing. Photo: Outwivcamera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Sources: the Bletchley Declaration as published on GOV.UK and mirrored by the Australian Department of Industry; The Lancet Digital Health; RPC; Sidley; AFP via Malay Mail.