Don’t read this article unless you agree to the Chatham House Rule
An archaic English gag order is enforcing silence everywhere in San Francisco, from health conferences to AI salons to dinner parties.
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, starting Monday in San Francisco, 8,000 insurance providers, pharma investors, and execs from Open AI, Amazon, and Meta will announce mergers, discuss advances in AI diagnostics and gene therapies, and puzzle over FDA scrutiny and compliance issues. But many of the sessions and “what’s next” debates will follow the Chatham House Rule — a gag order that prevents attendees from attributing information to speakers or sharing names or affiliations of other guests.
“The rule makes it terrible for networking,” said Malcolm Ocean, a Bay Area “renegade anthropologist” who will not attend the conference. “In principle, it prohibits you from saying to your team, hey, I talked to this guy, and he’s working on this startup.”
But the Chatham House Rule (it’s singular but is often misused in the plural) has caught fire in the business world, especially within the secrecy-obsessed tech industry, and now become ubiquitous at events across the Bay Area. At an AI summit in Redwood City, an intimate dinner party in Los Altos Hills, Brex Supper Club salons, Facebook’s local news summit, Scale AI’s leadership summit, and the World Economic Forum at Davos, the rules of the house are increasingly Chatham.
