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.
It’s also become prevalent, somewhat contentiously, on college campuses and has even crept into pop culture, via Netflix’s “The Diplomat,” a political thriller that dropped a reference to the Chatham House Rule in its heavily watched first season. Google Trends backs this up, indicating a 1,550% spike in searches for “Chatham house rules” as of Jan 7.
“I find that basically my whole life is Chatham House rules,” Sam Lessin, a general partner at Slow Ventures, tweeted in November.
For the uninitiated, the Chatham House Rule dates to 1927, when the Royal Institute of International Affairs, a policy institute located at Chatham House in London, introduced the policy to foster free speech among analysts. It gained traction in the turbulent pre- and postwar period among academics, who appreciated the candor it allowed them.
Ocean’s first brush with the rule came in 2018, at a weekend “ideas” conference. His welcome email contained a throwaway line about the rule, in addition to the wifi password and information on where to check in, “so you can reasonably assume that most people didn’t read it.” That’s a problem, he said: If there isn’t common knowledge about the existence of the Chatham House Rule, “it diminishes the effect of confidentiality.”
He has since become frustrated by the term’s overuse, noting that it has popped up even at dinner parties and small coffee meetups. “There’s no clear reason why we’re using it,” he said. “I haven’t noticed people saying spicier stuff.”
Jenny Lederer, a linguistics professor at San Francisco State University, argued that the Chatham House Rule has intrinsic flaws. “The rule dissociates ideas and opinions from the speaker, allowing them to express something controversial without taking personal ownership,” she explained. But that’s a fallacy, because “when humans process language, they always pay attention to who the speaker is.”
Jeremy Nixon, the 31-year-old founder of AGI House, an AI-themed co-living house in San Francisco, believes there’s value to the rule if it’s properly implemented. He has run events that delve into taboo topics — the experience of living with bipolar disorder or psychosis, for example — and said people wouldn’t have shared without the gag rule being in place. “That was not a conversation that could leave the room because of the reputational consequences to the person revealing it,” he said. “If you can have a conversation that’s impossible anywhere else, it feels really freeing and special.”
But Nixon no longer applies the rule at his events. “It became treated just as something you should do,” he said. “It doesn’t work nearly as well if not taken seriously.” Instead, his groups have moved to signing NDAs or explicitly stating that conversations are not to be shared externally.
But the rule continues to proliferate in the Bay Area. In December, the Foresight Institute, a nonprofit that has received support from the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation and investor Mitch Kapor, hosted a $1,000-a-head Vision Weekend. It kicked off with a VIP bash at The Institute, a secret club atop Salesforce Tower, then continued on to the Internet Archive, where 250 techies and researchers dived into panels on AI, machine consciousness, and “longevity cities.” The Chatham House Rule was in effect for the majority of events.
“The rule lends a sense of authority, credibility, and institutional sanction,” said SFSU’s Lederer. “The motivation is liberating ideas but removing accountability for those ideas is a shield for expressing controversial or unsavory ideas.”
But what one person sees as unsavory another calls long-overdue freedom of speech. A December survey found that 87% of U.S. college faculty struggled with hot-button topics; hence, the spread of the Chatham House Rule on campuses. Last year, Stanford University floated the rule as a policy to protect students from harassment, with violators facing penalties like lower grades.
This can be dangerous, said Lederer, as removing identity from speech “can potentially remove our own sense of morality.”
But as we enter a new political era, and political and cultural divisions deepen, the rule’s popularity shows no signs of fading. “In corporate culture, there’s a liberating and freeing quality to the idea that this is a safe space for me to say unpopular things and not get labeled as a conservative or racist,” Lederer said.
Or, as Ocean put it, “maybe it’s just a bad solution to a worse problem.”